My Stars and Your Valleys
by ketren
Summary: COMPLETE. Sci-fi AU. Jack Frost is a just a starship pilot trying to earn a living, but when he's hired to fly the Guardian and its crew of bigwig do-gooders to the edge of the known universe, the job could be more than he bargained for. Throw in vanishing children, stolen goods, bounty hunters, and weird superpowers, and maybe Jack should've stayed on his home planet after all.
1. Prologue - The Collectors

**Title: **My Stars and Your Valleys

**Summary:** Gen. Sci-fi/Space AU. Jack Frost is a just a starship pilot trying to earn a living, but when he's hired to fly the Guardian and its crew of bigwig do-gooders to the edge of the known universe, the job could be more than he bargained for. Throw in vanishing children, stolen goods, bounty hunters, and weird superpowers, and maybe Jack should've stayed on his home planet with his sister after all.

**Disclaimer:** I own nothing of Rise of the Guardians, although I would kill to be a little more like William Joyce.

**A/N: **Except for a very small portion of the story, all of this will be from Jack's perspective. **Please bear with the brief OC (Jack's little sister, Maggie) through the prologue, as the rest will all be from the POV of our favorite winter spirit. **Or not winter spirit, because it's a non-magical AU. But you get the idea.

**.**

**Prologue – The Collectors**

**.**

The Collectors are back. The dark hulls of their ships hang heavy in the sky like so many grey storm clouds settling in. Maggie Overland averts her eyes as she shovels snow off the porch, but the monumental ships weigh on her mind even when she turns her back to them.

When she has done as hasty a job as she can without repercussion, she tosses the shovel into the tool bin and grabs some firewood from the stockpile beside the door. Once she hurries inside, the ceiling shelters her from the sight of the foreign starships, the walls sealing her in like a dark cocoon, and she lets out a breath.

The Overlands' home is a dingy grey in the filtered winter light, its simple furniture stark and the space wide and empty: Jack's still out in the fields, and their mother is where she always is. Stomping against the floorboards to warm her feet, Maggie tosses the wood into the furnace and peels off her thin cloak to drape it on the back of the kitchen chair. Juniper, their calico, winds between her legs. The cat's hungry, but so is everyone else in the house. Maggie's got nothing to feed him she wouldn't eat first herself.

Their solar panels have cracked under the heavy snows, and they haven't had money to pay the gas bill in ages, so she stacks up some kindling and lights the fire with a flint. After cracking the dampers open, she retreats to sink into a chair at the kitchen table, the stiff, hand-carved wood digging into her back.

It would probably be a good idea for her to putter around the kitchen, picking at the remains of their pantry as she tries to decide how to cook their scant leftover food into something that will serve three. But there's no meat until they've saved up enough for it in the spring, and she's tired of looking at the assorted mealy vegetables produced by their mostly barren garden beside the porch.

"We'll fix something up," Jack would have said once, grinning at her and trying to make her grin back by tossing her some stringy collard greens or juggling the lumpy winter squash. Her brother hasn't taken an interest in their meals in a long time, nor has he spoken with his usual lightly cheerful tone.

Hunger gnaws at her insides, but she's gotten good at ignoring it. Instead, she grabs the pocket holo-comm from its charger at the window and slides it into her palm. The clear screen looks as ordinary as the glass in the windowpane at her side, but the device stutters to life as she swipes her finger across it. A short burst of light scans her face, identifying her as a registered owner, and a stream of images and text floats into the air just above the screen.

As the furnace releases wafting puffs of warm air, Maggie scrolls through the local Net again for any reports of the Collectors. _Weird—it's always more people leaving, _she thinks. _High hopes, off-world job placements right away, bringing money back home… _

"Don't be so suspicious, Mags," Jack would have said—_does _say, even now. He may not say it teasingly, but he still realizes that it's important to cut back some of her more fanciful ideas before they get out of hand.

It's been a few months since the huge Collector ships first appeared in the skies. Maggie can still remember the sudden distraction during a regular trip to the village square with her brother, snow crunching underfoot as they bartered for a few extra potatoes. Jack was pretending in the sight of their neighbors that they weren't desperate for money, and Maggie was pretending not to see the slight bulge in the chest pocket of Jack's coat, which probably carried the stolen chestnuts he'd swindled from one of the off-world vendors just a few moments ago. And then, suddenly, the sky had thundered with the rumble of engines; Jack instantly yanked her backward to pull her behind him. The huge, cumbersome ships had been so out of place on their tiny home world—which counted itself as lucky if it saw more than two dozen trade ships in a month—that he wasn't the only one to have such a strong and fearful reaction, to hide or shelter from the foreign sight.

Ostensibly, the Collectors have been sent from a HAB Sector research company looking for a steady flow of new employees. The guarantee of a steady job is difficult to ignore on the icy planet of FS-12, where work and credits alike are hard to come by.

Maggie declines the holo-comm's offer to read the next article aloud to her (_COMPANY EXPANSION MEANS MORE POSITIONS, FIRST COME FIRST SERVED_) and opens a list of the newest Collector recruits. Among the number are the elder daughters of the Overlands' closest neighbors, an assortment of men from the village council, and a handful of names Maggie does not recognize. Paige Wilcox, Maggie's best friend from school, has been gone for three weeks, lost to the powerful allure of the Collectors promises: food, housing, safety, work. Maggie hasn't heard from her since the day she left.

For the millionth time, Maggie wishes the holo-comm had a transmitter powerful enough to pick up more than the local Net. Planets like FS-12, which waft through space in the farthest Reaches of the known universe, don't exactly have the connections or credits to boost the region's communication signals—which is too bad. The HAB Sector planets might have had more information about the Collectors, or at least more information about the company the Collectors are supposed to work for, but there's no way to access their Net from so far away. At one time, Jack might have helped her try to boost the signal—tedious and painstaking work, to be sure, though occasionally rewarding—but he's not interested in much besides their dwindling credits these days. Maggie would feel stupid for even asking.

Anyway, out here on a border planet, few kids Maggie's age have access to a holo-comm at all, let alone know how to use one. In fact, the Overlands only have the one device between them, left by Maggie's father before he took off for the stars several years ago. Nowadays, of course, no one uses it but Maggie: their mother bears an intense distrust for technology, and Jack refuses to touch anything of their father's, not anymore. The only reason Maggie's familiar with it at all is because she used to muddle her way through the strange interface to spend time on the missing persons boards, looking for any hint of the fate of her father and thinking—foolishly—that he might one day have the decency to send them a message.

_Wishful thinking._ For all she knows, her father stepped onto that starship and died in a smuggler raid before ever reaching another planet.

"Margaret?"

Maggie cringes at the quiet voice that echoes down the stairwell. "Yes—coming, Mama." She slides off the chair and slips upstairs, avoiding the creaky ones out of habit and hugging the wall as though it will prevent her from being seen.

The windowless hallway is dim as always, their mother having prevented all of Jack's efforts to install cheap light fixtures, and Maggie passes her and Jack's rooms to reach her mother's room at the very end. The door is slightly ajar, and Maggie wrinkles her nose at the murky scent of stale alcohol and some cloyingly sweet odor, a mixture of perfume and sweat. She stands away from the opening, unwilling to get too close. Maggie hasn't crossed the threshold of her mother's doorway in ages.

"Margaret?" Her mother's voice is hoarse. "Are you there?"

"Yes, Mama." Maggie slowly edges closer, pushing her finger against the door to open it a little wider. The heavy curtains are drawn shut, and her mother, sprawled across the bed, is blanketed in layers of thick quilts.

"I'm…out of medicine, dear." She coughs once, and the blankets shift. Becca Overland weakly props herself up on her elbow, a pair of hazy brown eyes slanting toward Maggie. "Is there more downstairs?"

Once, Maggie thinks, her mother was probably considered pretty. Nowadays, her straw-colored hair hangs limply from her head like tangled string, and her saggy skin is thin and pale. With deep-set eyes mired in dark rings, she looks like the pictures in the pamphlets from Doctor Ortega's office, the ones warning of substance abuse and addiction. _Can_ her mother be considered an addict?

"No, Mama." Maggie swallows, the sour odor of cheap beer almost palpable as it sinks down her throat. "But we're going to have to wait, I think. We're low on credits and we're almost out of food."

Her mother drops her head back onto the pillow. "No. We'll manage the food. We always do. I can't just _endure _this pain."

Maggie clutches the hem of her skirt in tight fists. "I know, Mama. But—"

"_Do_ you know?" her mother asks, her voice steely. It's almost worse that Maggie can't see her face properly in the darkness. "Do you have any idea what it's like, lying here day after day? My skin is on fire…and my _nerves_…" Her voice dwindles into a rattling breath. One bony arm extends to the floor by the bedside, where a number of empty beer bottles pepper the carpet. "Your _brother _used to think the same way. Told me the pain was all in my head, the nerves were all in my head. Told me I didn't _need _the medicine; I just _wanted _it." She chokes out an unhappy little laugh. "Things didn't end well for anyone then, did they?"

A jolt runs through Maggie at the words, though she should be used to this sort of bite by now. Her mother has rolled over enough that she can see Maggie's face from her pillows, and Maggie shakes her head obediently, her hand automatically creeping into her boyishly short hair to finger the raised scar running behind her ear and across the back of her skull.

"I know you don't mean anything by it, Margaret dear. But I need my medicine. Borrow from the Starkeys next door; they won't mind."

Instead of mentioning that she and Jack have already borrowed more credits than they can afford from all of their neighbors, Maggie nods slowly. "Yes, Mama. I'll go tomorrow."

"I'm sure your brother isn't doing anything strenuous," her mother replies dismissively, coughing again. "Send him today, before the market closes. For medicine, not food. Or anything else," she adds snippily.

It is nearly evening, and walking to the market in the heavy snow will be inconvenient at best, but her mother rolls over in bed before Maggie can figure out how to protest, the reeking scent of sweat and cheap beer rolling away with her. The conversation is obviously over, the decision made. Maggie tentatively pulls the door shut against the harsh whuffs of her mother's hoarse breathing.

She creeps gingerly down the stairs. _Jack won't like this_, she thinks as she pulls her coat back on. Her vision is suspiciously blurry, and she grits her teeth to reel her tears back in, taking a few calming breaths. She hates this, feeling caught between an ailing parent on the one hand and Jack's blank stares on the other. There is no pleasing either of them.

But between the two, her mother and her brother, Maggie is far less frightened of Jack. She grabs the pocket holo-comm, shuts the door behind her, and steps into the cold air.

.

Jack has always been an expert at being invisible. In the rocky, pine-strewn hillsides of FS-12, he manages to disappear into the pale snow. The skill once drew Maggie's envy, especially since Jack used to use it for good fun: disappearing after a well-executed theft of Mr. Magrum's pears, spying on council meetings, dropping from tree branches to scare Maggie and her friends on their way home from the schoolhouse. Nowadays, he hides only so he can be alone.

Fortunately, he's currently caring for a handful of sheep, which makes him easier to track. The bleating alone draws Maggie in the right direction. She spots the livestock easily enough, their beige wool dusted with snowflakes as they pick at the dry brambles in the field near the Magrums' farm.

Still, it takes her a minute or two to find Jack, who is partly concealed in the bare undergrowth. He sags at the foot of a wind-bent tree trunk, perched atop its twining roots, his chin resting on his folded arms. The brown of his fur cloak acts as such effective camouflage that her eyes run past him twice before she recognizes him.

Her boots crunch in the snow as she approaches, and Jack picks his head up to look in her direction. Instantly, the moody slump to his shoulders eases away, and he shakes coffee-brown hair from his eyes and pastes something like a smile onto his face.

Maggie hates that he does that. Once upon a time, his worries were hers as well. Now, as she stares into the dark eyes that mirror her own, she can't even tell what's on his mind.

"Hey, Mags," he says, his voice flat even as he smiles up at her. "Why're you out here in the snow? It's almost time to pen the sheep."

"Mama wants us to go to the market before it closes," Maggie replies bluntly. "She's out of medicine again."

Something dark flickers across Jack's face, but it's gone in an instant. "Is she? Seems like we just got some."

"I know," Maggie agrees, "but she said she needs it."

Jack doesn't reply, just pushes himself to his feet. He's only fourteen, three years older than she is, but he towers several inches over her with his recent growth spurt. "Alright," he responds wearily, dusting snow from his pants, "we'd better move if we're going to make it in time."

Maggie waits as her brother leans down to swipe the shepherd's crook that once belonged to their father, holding it loosely away from him. He whistles for Spruce, the family sheepdog, and they begin to herd their tiny flock back home.

"How are we on food?" asks Jack, keeping one eye on Spruce, who is nothing but an amber blur as she nips at the sheep's heels. "Did we eat through all the rice yesterday?"

"Yeah. We're not so good," Maggie responds, though she doesn't elaborate. Jack can probably guess that they'll barely have enough to stretch past tonight's dinner. Normally, Jack and Maggie manage to tolerate their mother's demand for almost more medicine than the village doctor can keep up with, but it's harder in the winter when natural food sources are scarce: no berries, frozen streams, and little wildlife to speak of. "Did you see the Collectors?" she asks. It's a stupid question given the size of their ships, but she feels the need to change the subject.

Jack snorts. "How could anyone miss them?"

"They're already rolling out lists of who's going this time," Maggie replies, stepping up to totter across a snowy log. Jack automatically throws a hand out to steady her.

"Anyone we know?" he asks.

"Not really. One of the councilmen's sons, maybe." She leaps off of the trunk and slides a little on the icy ground.

"You ever hear from Paige?"

Maggie laughs. "Do I ever hear from anyone? Does _anybody _ever hear from anyone?"

"Mags, I really don't think it's some kind of conspiracy," he tells her again, rolling his eyes as he prods one of the sheep away from the edge of the road with the butt of his staff. "It takes a while to get into the HAB Sector planets, anyway. And you know we can't get anything but the local Net out here. It's not surprising we don't hear from people. And they _do _send their wages home, anyway."

"You don't _know _that," Maggie insists. "We never hear from them."

"Who else would make regular payments to family members back home? You think Black Industries just magically does that out of the goodness of their hearts? And so—what? They toss people through the hatch and into space, then pay their families?"

"It sounds stupid when you say it like _that_."

"It sounds stupid no matter _how_ you say it," Jack laughs, and despite her worries, his good humor is contagious. Maggie grins and elbows his side. The sky is settling into a bright violet with the oncoming twilight, and the trees cast long shadows as they abandon the rolling hillsides and set onto the path back home.

They pause briefly to pen the sheep, Spruce dancing around them to chase the creatures into the fence. "Lucky," Jack declares as he and Maggie heave a particularly dull-witted one across the threshold. "It's winter, so your wool's still worth more to us than your meat."

"Plus they're adorable," Maggie adds, rubbing a velvety head.

The Overlands' house may be decrepit and dark, but the fence's barrier system still has enough solar energy stored to power up, at least, and it whirrs to life with a dull thrum when she enters the code onto the pad.

As they turn their backs on their family home and take the dirt road toward the market square, Jack's strides briefly begin to slow. Before the rickety house is finally swallowed by the dark copses and thick brush, he turns back to the building with an odd, musing sort of gaze before shaking his head to direct them back toward the market.

The Collectors' starships still loom in the evening sky, but so do deep grey storm clouds. Snowflakes begin to drip from above, the flakes thick and heavy. Maggie watches as her brother looks up with distaste and rubs them off of his eyelashes. Jack hates the winter. He has for some time now.

The sound of the market begins to cut through the hush of the settling snow, and as they reach the crest of the last hill, assorted stands and makeshift shops and tables spill out below.

FS-12 is a quiet border world, though its village council makes it much more civilized than the other, more barbaric planets of its kind that give planets of the Reaches such a bad name. Maggie's heard stories of fantastic foreign markets with exotic foods and otherworldly trinkets and strange races, but FS-12's market is just a simple outpost. After all, the planet houses only a few million beings, mostly humans, struggling to make a living. It can barely broadcast its own local Net. But food and housing are cheap on border planets—especially if, like Maggie's father, you have the skills to build your own home—and for those who can live off the land, it's a much simpler lifestyle than the bustle of the HAB Sector.

And speaking of foreigners, there are actually _four_ Collector starships. One of them is docked in the field past the village square, its crouching metal form almost impossibly large against the tiny houses and two-story buildings of the village.

Jack and Spruce have already started down to the market, and Maggie hurries to catch up.

"Hey, do you…?" she begins before her mind can catch up to her mouth. She pauses, shaking her head.

"Do I what?" Jack asks after a beat, scanning the area around the foreign starship.

"Do you ever think maybe that's what Dad did? That he left with the Collectors?"

As soon as the words leave her lips, Maggie knows it is the wrong thing to say. Jack stills in surprise, frowning at her. His gaze falls, and hers follows it down to their father's hand-carved shepherd's crook in his hand. "No," Jack replies finally, his voice sullen. "He left years before the Collectors ever showed up. And we've never seen a single credit from him."

"I know," Maggie replies. "But—"

"He _left_, Mags," Jack interrupts, turning away. "And he's not coming back."

Maggie bites her lip. It's foolish to continue, but she has been mulling this over for so long that she can't stop now. "It's just that they promise all kinds of good things, so it seems like it would be tempting to—"

"_Mags._ Let it go."

And she does, except for one last thing. "I _hate _them," she adds bitterly, thinking of all the people waiting for loved ones, of Paige's promised letters that have never come, of their waiting for their father.

Jack's footsteps falter, but he does not respond.

The market is a single narrow road edged in low-roofed restaurants and wooden stalls topped with thick tarps to protect wares from the oncoming snow. Lines of harsh, solar-powered lights stretch across the road from end to end, and the smell of fresh mooncakes wafts through the air along with the muted thrum of guitar from the Outback Star Eatery up the street. Shoppers of all kinds—mostly human, with the odd nymph or leprechaun thrown in—meander about to sample food and gape at light shows. Displays of the newest holo-comms, decades more recent than the one in Maggie's pocket, glitter in the stark light beside recent advances in laser weaponry and automatic alarm systems.

A few of their acquaintances from the main square greet them with polite nods as they press past, but Jack and Maggie don't have as many friends as they once did. The Overland family keeps to itself these days. Maggie is profoundly aware of the pressing stares, and she knows Jack must feel them as well. A few whispers, too, follow them on their way: "_Those poor Overland kids,_"and "_Whole family's cursed, innit?_"

They've walked this road a thousand times before on their way to the doctor's apothecary, but Maggie doesn't remember the last time she felt so hungry while she was here. They pass a stand of produce fragrant enough to make Maggie's mouth water: currants, chestnuts, and aral berries along with off-world favorites like perps, cherimoya, and okanoi. Her stomach rumbles.

"Yeah, me too," Jack replies, a bitter twist to his lips. He pulls her sleeve. "C'mon."

The village doctor, Branson Ortega, is a friend by necessity: all of the Overlands have been his most frequent patients over the last few years. His clinic, a dusty grey closet just off the market road, possesses a display window boasting the latest in medicinal technology, complete with moving images and detailed records of the medicines currently on hand inside. As they approach, the display window flickers to show an image of the new and frighteningly lifelike computerized skin grafts that, if the scroller is to be believed, meld automatically to the skin and are capable of withstanding any blow without taking damage. _THE CLOSEST SCIENCE TO GENETIC MODIFICATION, _the scroller reads.

Jack and Maggie climb the stairs, and the pad at the door scans their bodies and health. A green circle lights up, and the door automatically curls into the ceiling to let them inside.

"Stay, Spruce," Maggie whispers. The brown collie whines but sits obediently beside the doorway as it closes behind them.

The inside of the clinic is considerably dingier than the outside display would lead most to believe, but its cramped waiting room is familiar and comforting to Maggie, who drops into the seat by the reception window. A dark-skinned ranch hand dozes in a chair nearby as a woman struggles to control her wailing baby in the corner.

"Jack! Maggie! Back already?" Dr. Ortega asks, peering through the window before Jack can even set their names down for the receptionist. He's a tired man in his fifties with hair of a premature grey, attesting to far too many years of worry here on FS-12. _Everyone here looks older than they really are, _Maggie thinks somberly.

"Just here for more medicine," Jack replies, shrugging his shoulders.

"Ah, right. Just a second." The doctor disappears into the back, and Jack shuffles back toward Maggie's chair.

"Jackson? And Margaret Overland?" the ranch hand asks, straightening in his seat with a yawn.

Maggie doesn't recognize the man, with his sun-tanned skin and curling brown beard, but Jack seems to. "Mr…Andresh?"

"That's me. Been a while," the man replies with a crooked grin. "Didn't think you'd'a recognized me."

"You and Dad used to take trips across the valley to trade sheep and cattle, right?"

"That's right. Stars, I can't remember the last time I seen your old man. Hell, last time I saw you, you was just big enough to help him herd the sheep. And your sister was all holed up at the house still." He pauses, leaning forward with a warm gaze. "Funny. You're two peas in a pod now—almost didn't recognize this one with all her hair chopped off," he adds, nodding his chin at Maggie. "What'd ya go and do a thing like that for, cutting all your long hair?"

Jack stiffens as he always does, fingers clenching guiltily at any mention of her changed appearance. It's true that they look more like siblings than ever since Maggie's accident three months ago, and were it not for the difference in height, they might even have been taken for twins. Dr. Ortega had to shave most of her hair to stitch the deep cut across the back of her head. Her hair, a matching shade to Jack's dark locks, has only now grown to a boyish length.

"Just thought it would look nicer like this," she replies, shooting Jack a defiant look.

"And where's your pa these days? Haven't seen him in half a decade at least, seems like."

"He left," Jack says casually. "Took off on a starship. You know."

The man looks taken aback, his light eyes filling with a pity that Maggie almost can't bear to see. After a moment, he laughs it off. "Ah, like everyone else, I guess? Collectors drive a hard bargain. Guaranteed work and enough credits sent home to buy your family's way out of debt."

"Something like that," Jack agrees.

"I'm on the way there myself right after I leave here, you know," the stranger continues as though Jack has not spoken. "My wife and I—" he pauses. "Well, it just seems to make sense. Credits go straight home to the family. And honest, I wouldn't mind a life in the stars about now. Fresh start and all that."

There is something oddly fierce in Jack's expression, something Maggie can't decipher, but he is spared from answering by the doctor's return.

"I'm afraid this is the last dose I can give you in such a short period," he says grimly, flipping through the data on his personal holo-comm. "Nocnitsa is addictive if taken too often. How's she doing, anyway?"

Maggie and Jack exchange a look. "No change," Maggie replies. "But she says it helps her not to hurt. And her nerves."

The doctor looks wary, but he still presses a small vial into Maggie's palm. Jack prods her side, and she pulls the holo-comm from her pocket and hands it to him.

"Thanks, doc," Jack replies, already moving over to the receptionist. The doctor stares after him for a moment, looking almost uncertain, before the crying child steals his attention away.

Maggie follows her brother, peering down at the familiar medicine. The vial, with its customary Black Industries logo depicting a running mare, is full of a coarse black powder, almost a fine sand. As Maggie turns the glass over, the substance seems to move and melt on its own.

"What do you mean?" Jack is saying, and Maggie glances up at his exhausted tone. "That's not possible."

"I'm sorry, but— " the receptionist taps at their holo-comm again. The display rattles off a few sentences in a dark red font. "There's no mistake. You don't have the credits to cover it."

"Not even the _medicine?_" Jack breathes, scrubbing his forehead. Maggie is similarly stricken: their funds have been incredibly low ever since their father left, taking the bulk of his business knowledge and a fair chunk of credits with him, but they have always had enough for medicine and food at a bare minimum. Lately, they've only been able to make payments for the medicine. And now…

"I'm sorry," the receptionist repeats awkwardly. "If you like, we can arrange it in a series of smaller payments…?"

Maggie, seeing that Jack appears too stunned to make a move, quietly sets the glass vial on the countertop. She gently pulls her brother's arm, leading him back out onto the darkening street. Spruce follows them, as do a handful of pitying glances.

.

There is a quiet metal bench just behind the secondhand shuttle parts store, the one whose stereo always booms awful, audiobotic remixes of their parents' classics. When they were younger and Jack didn't have the weight of the entire Overland family on his shoulders, he used to nick little sweets from the market for her, getel-crusted pastries shipped from neighboring planets, flower-like candies of unknown origin, and her favorite golden pears fresh from harvest out in the Loftian Galaxy. Back then, they used the area as a hideout, a place to reconvene breathless and exuberant over their stolen treasures.

Now, they collapse onto the bench in simultaneous stupor, Jack with his face in his hands and Maggie's eyes squeezed firmly shut, each frozen in silence for some time.

"What are we gonna do, Jack?" she moans aloud, shivering. The snow is still as light as it was earlier, but with the onset of night, the temperature has begun to drop dramatically. Spruce hops up onto the bench and lays her head and paws on Maggie's lap, but even the dog's warmth doesn't help much.

Her brother doesn't answer right away. "I don't know, Mags," he manages finally.

"We're gonna have to sell more of the sheep."

Jack makes a pained noise in the back of his throat. Maggie knows as well as he does that selling wool is the only reliable income they have now, along with their occasional sales of leftover produce from the garden.

A few minutes later, after her shivers grow more frequent, Jack stands suddenly, dragging the staff up with him. "C'mon," he orders. "No point in staying here."

They step out of the alleyway and into the light of the market. It's a little quieter now, some of the vendors having boxed away their goods for the night, but the crowds are thicker than ever, attracted by the temptation of food, alcohol, and music in one convenient place. Jack and Maggie weave through the milling bystanders on their way back to the side road that will take them home. Maggie is impossibly tired, her earlier hunger churning into sickening worry at the pit of her stomach. Spruce trots at her heels, and Maggie grabs the back of her brother's cloak so she won't lose him in the swarm of shoppers.

She is still lost in thought when Jack suddenly slows, pressing the staff into her hand. "Hang on a sec," he says, and then he melts into the crowd.

Blinking in surprise, she hurries forward to find him. Spruce whines, so Maggie rubs her head idly before grabbing her collar. She pulls the dog to one side and away from the flow of people, and she hangs on tightly lest Spruce wriggle away in the chaos.

Her brother reappears a minute later, a smile on his face of a kind she hasn't seen in a long while, a genuine warmth in his eyes. "Here," he murmurs quietly, pushing her so that her back is to the crowd. Both her hands are occupied, so he slips something into the pocket of her coat instead.

"What is it?" she asks, surprised.

Jack's face takes on a familiar mischievous air. "Snacks," he says, peering over her shoulder to be sure no one is watching before pulling down the lining of her pocket to reveal a handful of small, golden pears.

"Dinner," she replies, smiling uncertainly. "Thanks."

"I don't think we'll be able to get by just with stuff like that, though," he admits.

"I know. We'll…figure something out."

"Yeah," Jack agrees. She has seen that same, odd expression on his face earlier this evening, but it is now directed at her. Her brother smiles tightly, his dark eyes unreadable as he grips her shoulders.

Maggie frowns, unreasonably frightened. "Jack, what are you…?"

"I think I have an idea. And I promise everything's going to be alright." For some reason—and to her intense embarrassment—her eyes begin to tear up. Jack hugs her against his chest, a fond expression on his face when he draws away. "I'll be back, okay?

"Okay."

He vanishes once more into the crowd, slipping between strangers so easily that they might as well have been water. Maggie grips Spruce's collar more tightly, the weight of the golden pears comforting against her side.

It takes her only a few minutes to realize that he's _not_ coming back.

Anxiety rumbles in her chest, and she orders Spruce to stick to her heels, the cumbersome weight of the wooden staff unfamiliar in her hands. Now that she has allowed herself to worry, Jack's plan comes to mind almost instantly, as though she has known it all along but could not bear to admit it to herself. She hurries down the market road, nearly shoving people out of her way, until the path spills out onto the main square, its buildings far enough away that she can make out the field where the Collector starships dock.

Except that the field is empty, the hulking starship missing entirely. She lets the staff drop to the ground, where it rattles on the cobbled street.

Jack is gone. She replays his words to her. _I'll be back, okay? _he said. Meaning that he doesn't intend to leave as their father did. Only that doesn't really matter, does it? No one has ever returned from a Collector ship.

_I hate them, _Maggie thinks, tears falling in earnest now. _I hate them so much._

It will be many years before she sees him again.

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**A/N: **This was inspired by _Firefly, Guardians of the Galaxy _and a rewatching of parts of _Star Trek: TOS. _And _Ready Player One. _And _Treasure Planet. _Okay, also _Star Wars. _Basically if you're looking for all the space tropes, they're probably going to be here in this story. I do not apologize :-)

Going forward, know that **I do not pretend to be an expert on science and/or space. **I have been devouring books and documentaries on various aspects of space, and I've done the bare minimum of research into stuff from quasars to real-life invisibility cloaks, but I'm just a poor liberal arts major trying to get by. Feel free to let me know if there's something I've messed up, but keep in mind that I'm doing what I can.

So…if you're still here, please **leave a review**? This story is possibly the most difficult thing I've ever written—way out of my comfort zone—and I would really appreciate feedback of any kind. What worked, and what didn't? Were any parts confusing? How did you feel about the setting, the original characters? What was your opinion of Jack &amp; Maggie? Even a few words would be EXTREMELY helpful, just so I can figure out how I'm doing here. Recently, I feel like I'm floundering about on the keyboard, just tapping out random letters :-)

Till next time!

ket


	2. Jack Gives Bunny Conniptions

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**One – Test Flight, or Jack Gives Bunny Conniptions**

**.**

_Three Years Later_

The ship is not at all what Jack expects.

He frowns as he stares at it, his eyes flickering down to the short ad running across the screen of his pocket holo-comm: _Seeking experienced pilot for immediate hire (temporary). Must be able and willing to leave the HAB Sector for flight through Reaches. Candidate must be DISCREET. Compensation commensurate with experience. Payment in credits._

Jack's so grateful to have stumbled across the classified ad that he pretty much has it memorized by now. He spent the better part of the last few weeks screening the Net for any available crew jobs, but on an inner planet like SCORPio, jobs are pretty scarce. Well, _his _kind of job, anyway.

And he _really _needs a job. He's never been stranded in the HAB Sector for such a long time—although he imagines that he'd get a lot of odd looks from most people for calling himself _stranded _in such a heavily populated region. The Habitation and Bioformed Sector is a tightly clustered series of galaxies in which resides nearly ninety percent of the living beings in the known universe. Most people go their entire lives without leaving it, some without ever leaving the planet they're born on. Jack snorts. Thank the gods he isn't one of them, because if he ends up stuck here any longer, he's liable to hijack the nearest empty ship and find his own way off-planet, legality be damned.

Not that he'd really consider doing something like that. He has enough work looking over his shoulder all the time without the Intergalactic Coalition breathing down his back too.

He rubs his forehead. _Don't borrow problems, Jack, _he chides, staring up at the ship again, certain based on the coordinates listed in the ad that he's in the right place. Jack has flown smuggler ships for as long as he's been flying, and he can identify one on sight. Most of them are fairly easy to identify if you know what you're looking for. The beaten rotors, always the first part of a ship to wear down and the least likely to be replaced by an owner short on credits. Newly painted identification markers. And, more often than not, the ships are an amalgamation of many others, mutts created from leftover warship parts that no one wants or needs now that the Lunar Wars have long since ended.

But _this _ship is a purebred if ever Jack has seen one.

Next to the other hulking starships in the Lorosov City Dockyard, it glows like a diamond. It's small in size, fitted specifically for a light crew, its hull sleek and gleaming. And, Jack realizes, clambering excitedly up the cement steps toward its mooring, it's definitely a custom job, unless he's mistaken (and he never is, not about ships). The wings curve gracefully like the Rosalia-8773 models, but the thin sheen to the paneling, nearly invisible to the naked eye, suggest powerful shields—_and _the rear propulsion engines are closer in kind with the larger _Cespare _class, which are renowned for their unbeatable speeds, and—holy quasar on a stick, are those _lasers_, because passenger shuttles don't need those, and maybe it _is_ a smuggling ship after all.

As Jack approaches, the morning sunlight dances off the side of the ship, illuminating a name—_Guardian—_and a logo for NSN Industries. The latter makes Jack pause, his steps faltering as he swerves out of the way of a few green-leafed nymphs.

He should have known, really. Even here on SCORPio, so named because of the thousands of corporations that call the planet home rather than for the ancient astrological sign, there are few businesses with the financial reach of the technological giant Nicholas St. North.

Jack makes it a point to steer clear of big businesses and industrial corporations—well, one of them in particular, and all of them just to be on the safe side. It's another reason why he shouldn't be on SCORPio in the first place. He should be racing away screaming from this ship, and his common sense is telling him in the strictest terms to beat it, but his traitor fingers itch to test the steering out if he can wrangle it.

Well, going in for _one_ look can't hurt, can it?

The dockyard is bustling this morning, workers of every race darting about to prepare for the day as ship after ship whirrs to life. Jack feels oddly exposed out here in the open, and as he goes around to the side of the_ Guardian, _he heaves a relieved sigh to find that the main ramp is already lowered. The metal clangs dully under his boots as he climbs up—something that never would have happened on properly equipped smuggler ships outfitted with weight sensors and sound diffusers—and Jack finally steps into the ship's humming underbelly.

The entrance is small, a practical room with storage space built into the paneled walls. It's meant for loading and reception only, a sort of watered-down cargo bay. A corridor intersects it at the far end, one path stretching toward the back of the ship (bunks and more storage, Jack guesses based on the exterior) and one ascending in stairs (because the thrusters are lower on this ship, and so the engine must be below) toward what must certainly be the cockpit. Voices drift from this path, so Jack follows them upstairs.

The door's open, and Jack steps inside, intending to announce himself, but the words don't make it out as his brain stutters to a halt. The cockpit is _gorgeous_: large enough for a crew of eight or so to fit comfortably if needed, with reinforced glass that curves across the entire area, supported here and there by titanium beams that interlace like the vaulting of a cathedral ceiling. Glowing displays shine from directly on the glass, which acts something like a huge holo-comm: glimmering navigational reports dart across it, automatically brightening or dimming as needed. The controls are set into a steel console, a pair of thickly padded chairs arranged behind it for the pilot and navigator.

In his stupor, it takes him a moment to realize that both the chairs are filled, their occupants staring back at him.

"Oi, you lost, kid?" asks the Pooka, its dark brows raised. Jack has to do a double-take to make sure that it is, in fact, a Pooka. Last he'd heard, most of their race had died out in whatever war had happened before the Lunar Wars, long before Jack's time, and Jack's never seen one up close. The creature is thick-furred and tall like a yeti, but the long ears and whirling marks across its limbs are clear signs that it's another race entirely. "And what's with your hair?" he adds curiously, eyes darting to his colleague for confirmation. "I thought humans' hair only went white when they were older."

"Actually, I'm here about the pilot job," Jack replies once his words return to him, ignoring the bit about the hair: he's had enough curious stares by now to know the best course of action is to change the subject and hope people take the hint. "You still looking?"

"We _are_ still looking!" exclaims the other, this one a human. It takes Jack a few seconds of staring through narrowed eyes to place the jubilant, white-haired visage, but it doesn't take much: that glowing grin is plastered across ads all over the Net. Jack sucks in a quick breath.

"_Cosmos_, you're Nicholas St. North," the pilot says stupidly. "Like, the _NSN Industries _Nicholas St. North. You create and ship almost every gadget in the entire HAB Sector. You do that whole philanthropist thing where give away toys to children every year. You have an army of yetis. You…you…"

"That's me!" St. North says gleefully as the Pooka shoots him a withering look. "But really, yetis don't like being called _army. _Is sounding very threatening, no? They prefer _union. _And—ah! This is E. Aster Bunnymund, who you might not know so well, but who—"

"—does _all_ of the software designs for all of your systems himself and hid Easter Eggs in all of the video games with real prizes for anyone who found one oh my gods," Jack says all in one breath, deflating slowly as he shifts a little toward the door before he catches himself.

"Is a problem?" asks St. North worriedly, taking in the movement.

"No—that's…great," Jack croaks. _Yeah, really great, Jack. Way to keep a low profile. Just pilot for the most famous beings in the entire universe. _He quashes the thought. He needs the job, needs to get off of SCORPio, needs the money. "So, still hiring. Mind if I apply?"

"If you think we're hiring some ankle-biter to fly a top-o'-the-line starship, you must be outta your blooming mind," Bunnymund says firmly.

"Hey, just a second!" the pilot begins, fists clenching, because celebrity Pooka or not, no one disparages Jack Frost's flying skills. "I guarantee I'm the best pilot you're going to find. Seriously. I can stabilize a ship through an _ion storm_! I once navigated the event horizon of a black hole—not that I'd want to again unless I had to—and I can speed through an asteroid belt in hyperdrive _with my eyes closed_—"

"You're joking, right? What are you, fifteen?"

"I'm _seventeen,_" he snarls, and even North looks taken aback.

He tries to imagine himself as they probably see him: his unnatural hair, which looks bleached, probably doesn't do him any favors when he's trying to look professional, and instead of a uniform or formal clothes, all he's got are the leather jacket over his favorite hoodie, heavy-duty cargo pants, and worn boots.

Still, the point of age is always a bit of a touchy subject for Jack, since he looks somewhat smaller than his actual age would suggest. Normally, the pilot tries to pass for eighteen or nineteen, but he's not sure what kinds of background checks might happen now that he's applying for a _legal _job—and he's always said that the best way to keep your lies straight is not to tell them at all.

"Oh, seventeen. _Pardon me,_" the Pooka sneers.

Jack opens his mouth to bite out another retort, but snaps it shut. Fighting with this jerk—no matter how irritating he is—is only going to make Jack look like the immature child that Bunnymund is painting him out to be. Instead, he gives a long, steadying sigh. "Look, I know I'm young, but you could at least let me try out like everyone else. That's how these things normally work."

"You seriously think we're gonna let an ankle-biter like you at the controls of this ship?"

"I am thinking this is exactly what we should do!" St. North beams, crossing his arms over his chest as he leans back in the chair, oblivious to Bunnymund's glare once more. Jack hides a grin, thinking that for being the cunning head of a corporate megalith, Nicholas St. North really isn't so bad.

"North, you can't be serious—"

"What is your name?" North asks, ignoring the Pooka's protest. He pins Jack with a sage, calculating look.

"Jack Frost," he replies, frowning.

"Ah!" North exclaims, "I am thinking I recognize you. Yetis are sharing rumors."

"Rumors?" Jack asks, a heavy sort of feeling bubbling in the pit of his stomach.

North shrugs, smiling. "Rumors of young pilot named Jack Frost. At NSN Industries, we have what you may call 'Naughty List.' Is list of anyone suspected of smuggling, especially of smuggling stolen NSN goods. We hear name from crew members who are caught by Intergalactic Coalition—always 'Jack Frost.' You hold record for naughty list."

Jack isn't breathing anymore. Although somehow, when he imagined what would happen when he was finally called out for his smuggling record, he never thought he would be standing in the room with St. North himself, or that St. North would be beaming benevolently at him as though stolen goods—especially stolen goods that rightfully belonged to him—were just a part of some huge cosmic joke.

Bunnymund can't seem to believe the expression either. "So…we're obviously _not _gonna let him fly the ship, then?" he says slowly, in the voice of someone adjusting his tone for small children or idiots. "Because he's a _wanted criminal_? Right?"

"Do not be ridiculous, Bunny! He is best man for job!"

"North, you _just said—_"

"I know what I am saying! Jack Frost has many rumors, and he is smuggling NSN goods. We talk that over later," he adds, waving his hands dismissively. "_But! _Jack Frost is also having many rumors for other things—he is excellent pilot, and excellent at being invisible. Jack Frost _is never caught_. Is why yetis only give me _rumors_. Rest of smuggling crews, they are not smart—they are caught on scanners; IGC is having their files on record! But not Jack Frost. He is invisible. No one is having his files. That is someone we need—someone smart."

After he surfaces from his stupor, Jack nods innocently at Bunnymund, who seems torn between growling at Jack and twitching his fingers as if to strangle St. North.

"So…you're saying I get the job?" Jack clarifies, ignoring Bunnymund's glare.

St. North smiles at him. It is a surprisingly mischievous thing. "I am saying you get one shot."

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It takes Jack an inordinate amount of time to stop internally gloating over the ship's controls. They're impossibly light to the touch, sensitive to the smallest gesture as if somewhere in the starship's mechanics is something organic that understands his will intrinsically.

He shouldn't take this job—he absolutely _can't—_but it won't hurt just to _test _such an amazing starship. He knows the moment he sits in the pilot's chair that this test flight will be by far the easiest thing he's ever done, and that walking away from this job might be the hardest thing he'll ever do.

The onboard computer chirps, a readout across the window stating that the dockyard guidance system has cleared them for takeoff. St. North and Bunnymund stand at his back as he starts the ship and preps for their flight; he can vaguely see their faces in the glass before the internal lighting system automatically compensates to bring the view of the exterior into focus. The shuttles and oversized transportation barges clustered nearby begin to sink slowly from view, the dockyard itself growing smaller as Jack gently takes them up into the air. Under his guidance, The_ Guardian _flits gracefully—and so _quietly, _he realizes with an excited jolt, without the slightest noise to indicate moving gears or fuel—around the lumbering construction rigs and the lazy fleets of starships.

As the grids of SCORPio's glimmering steel buildings of fall away below, St. North finally settles into the navigator's seat. "Rumors are being right. Is very smooth work, Jack," he commends.

Jack snorts, pushing more fuel into the rear thrusters as they glide out of the atmosphere. "This is nothing. Let's get out into the black."

The green of SCORPio's sky churns into deep jet. Up here is the vast darkness of space, invisible for the light of the sun while they were planetside. Gradually, Jack's awareness begins to expand into the emptiness, a thousand icy fingers stretching and feeling and finding. The cold darkness of space stretches out around him, dotted by pebbly asteroids and darting comets for several millions of miles until, in any given direction, it reaches other clusters of HAB Sector planets farther away.

He wasn't lying to Bunnymund earlier. Jack could close his eyes and all of this would be as present to him as ever.

This is home to Jack, the frozen void of space, his innate awareness of icy rocks and wastelands and burning suns that melt away all sensation of cold. For a moment, he almost wishes they could leave right now and never return to SCORPio.

"Are you even _using_ the Navigation Board?" Bunnymund grumbles from over his shoulder, and Jack's near-trance stutters to an abrupt halt as he jumps in his seat.

"No backseat flying," Jack snaps. "But no, I'm not. I told you, I don't really need a Nav Board most of the time. Don't really need a lot of this, actually," he adds, gesturing to the glowing panels of buttons that deck the console. "Most ships I've been on couldn't afford this kind of system. I got by just fine without all of it."

"Is beautiful, is it not?" St. North asks, and for a moment Jack thinks that the industrialist is just attempting to deflate what might become a snarky argument between them, but he seems to hardly be paying them any attention. Instead, he stares in wonder out of the curved window toward the planet. Sheer breaths of cloud rake across the world they have left, and morning light paints their cottony surfaces in bursts of orange and red. They are far enough away to see the night as well, the glow of millions of golden lights scattered across continents that have yet to wake in the daylight.

Something in St. North's gaze is oddly wistful, and Jack has to tear his eyes away from the man's face to focus back on what's in front of him. "Have you ever left SCORPio before?" he asks before he can reconsider.

St. North is thoughtful for some time. "Many years ago, I traveled a great deal. Nowadays, I stay on planet. Is where business is, where we do all our work. But always I am thinking it would be nice to return to stars one day."

"Must be hard, being tied to your work like that," Jack agrees sympathetically, thankful to be so unencumbered. He allows the ship to drift slowly in orbit so that St. North can watch his planet whirl imperceptibly on its axis, a marble suspended in space. A thought occurs to him, and he frowns, leaning back in his seat. "Hey. Guys like you _must _have a pilot on your employment roster somewhere…but you took out an ad. What gives?"

Out of the corner of his eye, he can see St. North exchange a glance with Bunnymund.

"Circumstances are…special," St. North begins. "We are not looking for internal promotion at this time." It sounds like a recording, and Jack raises one eyebrow.

"But we've been getting the rottenest sorts of blokes turning up to reply to the ad," Bunnymund says. Jack's not sure whether he's meant to be included in that number. "Like that one who called himself the Groundhog, right North? Worst sort of drongo, you ask me. It's like we asked for the dregs of society to show up and blast the ship out of the sky with their flying!"

_Well, duh, _Jack thinks, _you used the words "discreet" and "flight through the Reaches." You've basically put a call out to every smuggler on the planet. Not that you knew, I guess._

"And we have had few applicants, even these dregs," North murmurs in agreement. "We are lucky you found us at all, Jack Frost."

_Lucky as all hell, _Jack thinks. The pilot spent weeks in the library scouring ads across the Net, poring over every newsfeed. The pocket holo-comm he'd saved up to buy is capable of the basic networking, communication, and searching required in his field, but it's a cheap and outdated model that doesn't have the speed of even the library tech. The library holo-comms are lightning-fast, with sixty-inch screens to boot. They're normally pay-by-the-hour, but Jack managed to get the library moon-bots to waive his fee by shelling out some crackpot story about being an Academy graduate who'd crash-landed here by mistake.

But for all the time he'd spent scouring ads, the one for this job had been in a message sent directly to him. The sender's information was encrypted; only the ad, the date, and the time were visible. Jack doesn't like to keep in touch with past employers and crews—smugglers are a transient and unattached bunch—but if an old crewmate _did _send this job his way, maybe he shouldn't object.

His musings are interrupted when St. North finally pulls his eyes from the window. "Here is truth about job: NSN Industries does much work with Bunnymund and other main players—you will meet them later. We are team, you see? But recently, some technologies we are developing have gone missing. Once or twice, is mistake maybe. But five times? There is something more serious afoot. We sent out investigators, but they find no results. And now we are thinking it is best to go ourselves. This job must be done right, and we will do it our way."

Before meeting St. North, Jack might have laughed at the possibility of any of the industrial giants of SCORPio doing anything productive at all. His mental image of them has always involved them sitting with their thumbs up their asses while other people run their companies. He's never seen much of Bunnymund in the media, but St. North has always presented an image of a grandfatherly and jubilant old man—kindly but useless.

It's only now that Jack starts to think that this image may have been carefully manufactured. Perhaps it's something in their resolute expressions or in the stark white light of the sun that makes St. North and Bunnymund, both drawn to their impressive full heights, seem so unnaturally imposing. Either way, Jack finds himself beginning to believe that the pair of them is more than capable of hunting down a culprit on their own.

"Of course, the matter of disappearing research, crucial to our industry, is very…delicate," St. North continues, standing as he casually rolls his shoulders. Bunnymund pulls out some strange sort of sharp, curved wood—_a boomerang, _Jack's mind supplies helpfully, vaguely recalling that most of the ancient tales of warrior Pookas involved their inflicting mortal injuries with strange, returning weapons—and begins sharpening it. "We are doing our own little search, and we are keeping the media from hearing about it. And we would appreciate if it stayed that way, yes?"

For a second, Jack doesn't realize that he's supposed to feel threatened; he's too busy staring curiously at Bunnymund's weapon. The Pooka clears his throat pointedly.

"Wh—oh. Oh, yeah. Discreet and everything. Got it." Bunnymund is still looking at him in suspicion, so Jack laughs and adds, "What would I say to people, anyway? 'Yeah, by the way, I got hired for a secret recon mission with Nicholas St. North and his sidekick Bunnymund—"

"_Side_kick?"

"—yeah, they just happened to take a day off of basically running SCORPio, but I swear, they just wanted to hire seventeen-year-old pilot me for the job, that's all.' Who'd believe me?"

Bunnymund towers over Jack, frowning in irritation as the pilot grins lazily. St. North thankfully seems more amused than his colleague. "We are glad we can count on your discretion," he offers. "It would be a pity otherwise."

Jack tries not to think about what this could mean as he reluctantly turns the ship back toward its berth.

"And now, there is no need for getting authorities involved in stolen machinery," St. North continues. "Because now you are here, and you have been pilot of smugglers in past—"

"No, mate, he _is_ a smuggler," Bunnymund argues, rolling his eyes, "a wanted one, and apparently the kind with a _reputation—_"

"—so the _good kind,_" Jack adds cheekily. "And I'm _technically _not wanted, since the IGC doesn't even know I exist."

"And that is very lucky, because we could use extra help," St. North finishes, as though there have been no interruptions.

The_ Guardian _slices back through the atmosphere with no trouble at all, only the faintest tremors of turbulence signaling re-entry into the skies of SCORPio. For a moment as they descend, Jack studies the blunt-body design of the curved cockpit, devised in order to cushion a fall from orbit, and the clever tempering across in the glass window that dissipates the heat and flares in a controlled fashion. Every aspect of this ship has been designed for efficiency, speed, and comfort, and every material is the very best that money can buy. Briefly, he wonders how much St. North threw at the crafters to get this as a final product, and then he turns his attention back to re-entry, because even with a ship of this quality, ascents and landings are usually the trickiest part of a pilot's job.

Jack pushes the ship's thrusters full force once more, letting gravity do only part of the work as he directs the ship across the darkened sky along the back of the planet, chasing the morning sun to the Lorosov region. There are several ships around them in the atmosphere; the scanners show a few fleets of military IGC ships to the east and what might be larger transport barges farther south, but Jack has a mostly clear shot back to the dockyard. After a few minutes of intent work, Jack becomes distantly aware that St. North and Bunnymund are still arguing over him.

"We're putting our trust in this hoon who—need I remind you he's just a kid, North? You can't really expect him to fly this thing for us!"

"Who else do you want to choose? He has shown he can fly ship admirably!"

"'_Admirably_?' He just took us up and back down! _I _could probably do that myself, if I had to—"

If Jack weren't so intent on their smooth descent, he might have belted out a response. But since he is, a thought strikes him and he smiles, edging the throttle a little faster as he rotates the wings inward. _Time to see how fast this girl can go_.

It takes only seconds for St. North and Bunnymund to notice the increased speed, not because of any changes in velocity in the cabin—the standardized gravity field even softens the tug of inertia—but because they have finally pulled out into the sunlit morning as they approach Lorosov, and the ground is darting toward them at an alarming speed.

"Mate, you've got this thing sorted out, right?" The pilot doesn't tear his eyes from the skies before him, but Bunnymund's voice sounds slightly laced in worry.

"Don't worry about it," Jack replies coolly, making a point not to look at any of the displays on the main console.

He allows the ship to even out as they near the ground, running nearly parallel to the planet itself. Still, they are flying much too low for Bunnymund's comfort; Jack can sense the Pooka shifting uneasily behind him.

"Ha!" St. North crows excitedly, dropping into the navigation seat once more. "Now we see how you can really fly!"

"Look, there's no need—" Bunny cuts himself off as they dart frighteningly close to a skyscraper; Jack has led them directly into the industrial grid, where shimmering towers edged in glowing solar panels dominate the landscape. This is technically a forbidden area for starships of this size, and for good reason: it takes definite talent to maneuver through the latticework of buildings with interconnected walkways and shuttle platforms. Jack risks it, though. He's a thousand percent certain that this ship can outfly any IGC ship the authorities throw their way, and he's got more than enough skill to make the area his personal playground. It probably doesn't hurt that even if they _are_ caught (by some miracle), having the famous Nicholas St. North and E. Aster Bunnymund on board will certainly be more than enough to make the authorities look the other way.

He swerves in and out of the buildings in dizzying twists and corkscrews; Bunny heaves a shout of alarm as they jet beneath a connecting bridge with only a foot of space for safety. A gazebo area affords Jack room for a hairpin turn, and they shoot out toward the next street.

St. North is laughing gleefully in the seat next to him. "Brilliant!" he whoops, and Jack grins and thinks that he could come to get along with the industrialist just fine.

Jack takes them back toward the dockyard, weaving through the buildings, his path so low to the ground that some of the hovercars automatically set off their proximity alarms, which ring shrilly in the air behind them as they pass.

Bunnymund gasps as the dockyard flies toward them, but Jack flips the landing gear into place and takes them down so gently that there is hardly a bump to indicate that they have finally touched the ground.

St. North is still laughing. "Ha! Well, you certainly have job. I cannot remember the last time I have flown like that!"

Jack returns the grin, and then his excitement stutters to an abrupt halt. "Wait, what?" _No, Jack, you're _not _supposed to be taking the job, remember?_ The pilot frowns, shaking his head."That's great and all, but I think I'm gonna have to walk away from this one," he says, hardly believing the words are coming out of his own mouth.

"Not taking?" St. North echoes in confusion.

In answer, Jack stands up, turning to face the exit. Bunny is heaving huge gulps of air, one paw over his chest, and if that doesn't make Jack feel like a million credits, nothing will. "But, uh—this is a great ship. Thanks for letting me have a chance to fly her. It was really…" something. Amazing. Unbelievable. The kind of thing that has spoiled him for all other ships.

"You are—leaving? You do not want job?"

_Yeah, Jack, don't you want the job? _"It's not that, exactly. I just…don't think it's a good match."

St. North asks raises an eyebrow at the hesitance in his voice. "What can we do to make you stay?"

"Ugh, let 'im go, North," Bunnymund grumbles, looking oddly sick as he glares at Jack. "Bludger."

"It's—yeah. It's nothing personal; I just think it's not the best idea, you know?" Jack rubs the back of his head sheepishly as he heads toward the door. The console and display are still lit up as he backs away.

"Jack Frost," St. North says, amused, as he folds his arms across his chest. "You have not even asked about payment!"

Jack hasn't asked because he doesn't want to know. People like St. North and Bunnymund, with millions of credits in their accounts, are likely to bestow their money generously on this sort of job. And Jack hardly needs any more temptation, especially when picturing the lowering figure in his own account.

"Ah, no, that's okay," Jack replies, holding up a hand.

"Because for you only, we are giving very good recompense in credits, but that is not all," St. North replies conspiratorially. "For you only, we are giving _Guardian._"

The cockpit is devoid of its typical running beeps and hums now that its main systems have powered down, so Jack is certain that he's heard St. North correctly. Except that he can't have.

"Run that one past me again."

"We built _Guardian _some time ago ago specifically for purposes like this: we believed we are needing speedy ship on occasion, with impenetrable protections, built to handle anything. But as I am saying earlier, we spend far too much time here on SCORPio to use starship! We have never even taken her out of atmosphere! And I do not believe we could use this ship as well as you can. I am thinking, perhaps it is best if we give _Guardian _to good owner, who will use her more often—and fly her very well."

Jack's brain has stuttered almost to a halt. Having a ship of his own, a wish so far out of his pay grade that he can barely imagine having one, would change everything. Jack would be able to choose his own jobs with much more scrutiny; he would be able to earn much more credits much more quickly with his ability to travel to farther jobs. _And_ it means that Jack can leave the inner HAB Sector and never come back if he wants, never have to worry about being chased, never have to watch his back again.

It means that Jack could have a home. For the first time in years.

"How can I say no to that?" Jack manages finally, grinning wryly at St. North's smug look.

"That is _wonderful!_" St. North booms, nearly startling the pilot out of his skin. He holds one beefy hand up for Jack to shake, and Jack grasps it warily. "Now we humans outnumber all of the others on ship! Two humans, one of everyone else!"

Bunnymund rolls his eyes.

"Good to work with you, too, Mr. St. North," Jack laughs.

"Please! To friends, I am North. And he is Bunny. And we are going to be good friends, Jack. I feel it—in my belly."

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**A/N: **Thanks SO MUCH to those of you who left reviews last chapter, especially all of the guest reviewers whom I couldn't thank personally during the week.

**MustBeAWeasley: **Thanks for the feedback – I'm really glad you liked it :-)

**Painapple: **Wow, thanks for the review! I'm definitely trying to work on character development, so at least it seems to be coming out ok. I completely agree with you about the romance thing: I'm all for a good romance fic, but I'm definitely leaving it out of this story. I think that's a bit too complicated for me in conjunction with keeping the plot on track!

**Guest TGS: **Your feedback was so helpful! Basically, you made me feel a little better about all of the parts of the story I was most worried about :-) As for Jack, he's had a lot happen in his life that makes him different from his movie version, but I'm kind of trying to put him on this weird path of _growing _back into character like we see him in the movie – if that makes sense? We'll see how that works out in the next few chapters!

Going forward, I'm going to try to update this every other weekend—though I'll probably get some chapters (like this one) out more often than that.

If you liked the chapter, let me know what you thought? Constructive criticism and feedback of all kinds are welcome!

Happy reading,

ket


	3. Into the Nuthouse (for a Good Cause)

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**Three – Into the Nuthouse (for a Very Good Cause)**

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_It's a little awkward trying to tell billionaires that everything you own fits into your backpack,_ Jack thinks, dumping said bag onto his new bunk. He heaves a deep, calming breath as he closes the door behind him, thankful for a little bit of quiet and privacy. Mr. St. North—_North_—has shown him to his own private cabin, which is usually something of a luxury aboard such a small ship. Except, he imagines, on ships like this, where the owners probably go through credits like most people go through water.

Confined to the dimensions of the ship, the cabin is fairly narrow, and the ceiling is low. Still, it's far more comfortable than the kinds of accommodation Jack has come to expect. Jutting from one wall is a plush mattress and real down pillows instead of the cots he's used to—which are basically glorified cardboard. When he plays around with some of the controls on the pad by the door, he discovers a retractable mirror and titanium sink that slide into the wall. A wooden desk folds out from near the bed, and a button on the wall panel reveals a hidden door to _his own private bathroom and shower_. Best of all, he has an actual porthole—tiny though it is—that looks out onto the bustling dockyard below.

Jack likes to watch the stars wheel overhead as he dozes off; it's one of the reasons that he always sleeps in the pilot's chair during jobs like this (the other being the inherent privacy of the cockpit, far from the annoying gab of the rest of the crew in their communal bunk). But he can get used to a room like this. _Will_ get used to it, if North really means to give him the ship in payment for such a simple job.

Hopefully simple, anyway. North was unable to give him a time frame with any certainty. "We will explain everything when others arrive," he states firmly. "But the job, it may range from two weeks to two months. There is no telling, really."

Jack's used to shorter jobs, but his curiosity has been piqued. There's no way he can walk away from this one. Not now.

Once he's finished exploring the tiny cabin, he strips to take advantage of his private shower: though he can always clean up a little in the public restrooms, it's been a while since he's felt really clean.

Jack's become an expert in catching rest in odd places to save a few credits. He's not opposed to stretching out in public buildings, usually in the quiet stacks of the library or across the seats of busy transit centers, where he has access to better holo-comms to check the classifieds. Occasionally, though, he'll take his chances in abandoned hovercars whose rusted solar panels can no longer store enough energy to get off the ground. These tend to be quieter but less safe: SCORPio may be wealthier by far than most of the planets Jack's ever seen, but it's not without its fair share of violence. It also suffers from the same inexplicable disappearances that plague the rest of the universe—including the Reaches. The numbers have climbed in recent years, mostly whisperings of abductions in the poorer populace, always rumored but rarely reported.

The planet's capital, Lorosov, is a booming city of 54 million inhabitants, few of them native-born and most of them trickling in from all across the galaxy, attracted by the glistening solar towers and the smell of industry in the murky air. Most of its denizens, in their confusing mixtures of creeds and races, are tech-whizzes seeking jobs on the planet that churns out more scientific advancements than anywhere else in the universe, and their enthusiasm for the work and their distance from their native worlds makes them oddly friendly and accommodating to strangers.

Jack's gotten lucky now and then bartering for a temporary bed or various goods, but he doesn't do it often. As in any wealthy city, Lorosov harbors its fair share of drunkards and drug addicts, savvy criminals, the chronic homeless, and vagrant wayfarers, and Jack is good at blending into that kind of crowd. But he watches warily for a certain keen gaze in the faces of strangers, a hungry and calculating look.

Like everywhere else in the universe, people have an odd tendency to vanish without a trace on Lorosov. Jack tries not to be one of them.

All things considered, if he's going to be roughing it, his favorite local place to camp is somewhere in the tree boughs of the Lorosov Nature Preserve, a park of about three square miles that houses some of the only vegetation that still grows in SCORPio's soil. He feels relatively safe in its branches, out of sight and out of reach of opportunistic criminals and would-be thieves. Besides, it's the only _green _place on the entire planet, as far as he's seen. At any rate, it's definitely the only place that reminds him of home on FS-12, and it's the only place where he allows himself to remember it. His old home, back with Maggie.

He steps out of the shower and rummages through his pack for a change of clothes—_they've got to have a laundry pod somewhere around here where I can clean those too, _Jack thinks—and throws on a shirt and brown pants. After a moment of hesitation, he pulls his favorite blue hoodie over his head. It's old-fashioned, sure, but it's also damn soft and only cost him a handful of credits at a thrift outpost a few years back. He's not so keen on the leather boots, but most potential employers don't appreciate barefoot workers. When he looks up, the afternoon sun is bright at his window, and he suddenly feels oddly cramped in the small space.

The _Guardian _will leave in the evening to allow enough time for the remaining two members of this temporary crew to meet here. Until then, Jack's time is his own, so decides to venture back into the cockpit to fiddle with the unknown gadgets and switches that line the console. He'll never _need _them, not like other people do—for years, he's been inherently aware of the position of every star and planet and speck of dust without the aid of technology of any kind—but if this ship will be his one day, he's going to know it inside and out.

Jack steps out into the narrow corridor that stretches toward the cargo bay. The automatic door barely has a chance to whir shut behind him before something fluffy darts into him, knocking him hard onto the metal walkway.

"Ooh, sorry!" a voice says as he groans. Jack looks up into bright purple eyes and a veritable rainbow of feathers hovering just above his head. A fairy, he realizes with a grin. Every race has its ups and downs, and Jack has met all sorts throughout his travels, but he's never met a fairy he didn't like. "No flying in the halls," the fairy says, and it takes Jack a second to realize that she's not aiming the words at _him; _she's scolding herself. She drops down to set her feet onto the floor before catching sight of his amused grin, which makes her face melt into an expression of wonder.

For all of three seconds. Then she sinks to her knees on the floor beside him, and Jack finds himself with a mouthful of fingers. "Oh—those teeth! _Stars_, just look at them, they're practically pure white—you must brush them so well! And the flossing—oh, they're bright as moonlight, and look how they shine!"

"Uhh—" Jack manages, and the fingers are removed almost instantly.

"I'm so sorry!" the fairy says, her tone flustered and her feathers bristling. "I just—I have this side thing where I run a public health organization, and well, I've gotten very into it. It's sort of my baby…"

The fairy's beaming expression is oddly familiar to Jack in the same distant way that North's had been earlier, and a suspicion forms in his mind. He's seen her before, floating on the screens of a thousand holo-comm videos. The fluttering, hummingbird-like creatures that dart curiously around their sister's shoulders only confirm his theory. "You're Toothiana," Jack realizes finally, eyebrows climbing. "The CEO of Wisdom Teeth—you made that memory storage system that can record _actual things that happen to people_."

"Guilty as charged," the fairy responds with a tinkling laugh. "But it's not so much that it can record actual _events_ as that it can record the brain's perception of an event by registering output from the synapses throughout the cerebral cortex. Not that you asked," she adds, slightly embarrassed.

Jack, still flabbergasted, continues, "Don't they…they call you the Tooth Fairy because of that health campaign about the teeth being a sign of the whole body's health—and..." Though she smiles amiably at him, he feels like he's rambling, so he bites his tongue to keep from blurting out the rest.

Toothiana, if the media is to be believed, is also the heiress to some sort of wealthy dynasty over on Punjam in the M64 Galaxy. The only reason she hadn't sat back and lived off her family's credits was because they apparently didn't allow their females to do much of anything—which wasn't at all her style. Tooth had fought her way out with skills learned from one of her brothers, establishing her Wisdom Teeth industry here on SCORPio, halfway across the universe from her home. Of course, she'd also come with a small army of her little sisters, who apparently help her in her work.

Looking at her now, all bright smile and shimmering feathers, he's not entirely sure he buys the whole warrior princess thing.

"That's right. Although I do get a little _too_ involved—that part was meant to be a side project," she admits. "But anyway, I'm guessing you're the pilot that North told me about on the comm?"

"Jack Frost. You wouldn't know me—I'm not…" he waves his arm vaguely instead of stammering on about being _famous _or _rich _or _brilliant_. Then he smiles sheepishly. "Actually, I say that, but North apparently did."

"Well, North knows everything about everyone," she laughs. "It's one of his many talents. Nice to meet you, Jack Frost. Call me Tooth."

She shakes his hand and then stands, pulling him off the floor.

"I was just going to—oh, Sandy! So good to see you!" she exclaims, looking over Jack's shoulder. The pilot turns to find a radiant little man of glimmering gold who waves cheerfully at Toothiana. Jack prides himself on being well-versed in regards to the inhabitants of the known galaxies—he's pretty much seen it all—but this newest arrival stumps him. In the dim light of the corridor, he positively glows, and his clothing seem to be made from—is that _sand?_

Fortunately, Tooth has picked up the slack as Jack stares curiously. "Sandy, this is Jack Frost, the new pilot North and Bunny found. North says he's the best that credits can buy."

At this, Jack shrugs modestly, but he's distracted once more by a wheeling series of symbols that swirl into and out of existence above Sandy's head, images that are obviously meant as a form of communication. _This _Jack knows, he realizes suddenly: he's heard the stories of the legendary Sanderson Mansnoozie.

"_Cosmos,_" he bursts out before he can help it, "is _everyone _on this ship some kind of famous freaking genius?"

Tooth hides a smile beneath her hand. "We've all worked together on and off in the past," she explains politely. "It's…good for business. We had similar interests. And in the end, we happened to become very good friends as well."

Sandy nods in agreement, smiling up at Jack.

"Okay, but before anything else," Jack adds, turning a shy smile onto the new arrival, "can I just say that it's a huge honor to meet you. You're kind of my hero. I mean, your Dreamsand Virtual Reality System? Pretty much one of the best things that's ever happened to me. They had one at most libraries I used to visit, and they were always loaded with all kinds of training programs. It's where I first figured out I wanted to be a pilot and how I got a start working with the starship mechanics…" _Yep, definitely babbling now, Jack, _he thinks, though Sandy looks warmed rather than put out by the attention. _But I might as well go all the way. _

"And, uh, I know this is probably a little weird, but it's just—you're kind of a legend in a few circles, and I've always wondered about the rumors. Because they say…you're ancient? That you were once a _star_? Because of the dust and all. Literally a star, I mean, not like, you know. A celebrity."

Sandy shrugs his shoulders, rolling his eyes up to the ceiling with a mysterious smile.

"Not telling, huh? I guess that's cool," Jack grins.

The sandperson—star?—whatever he is—wheels a series of golden shapes above his head. They melt one into the other at a dizzying rate, and Jack is unable to catch more than a few: a pointing finger, a rocket, a question mark. The symbols stop abruptly, and the man looks up at Jack expectantly before the pilot even has time to process them.

"Uh…what?"

"Sandy's wondering what your story is, that North found you to pilot the ship on such short notice," Tooth explains.

"Who, me?" Jack says, waggling his eyebrows at Sandy and aiming to echo the mysterious smile. "I'm just a pilot."

The sandman doesn't laugh audibly, but his face crinkles in a telling expression of amusement, his shoulders shaking in mirth.

"Well, looks like we've all met," deadpans a dry voice from behind them. Jack turns to find Bunny leaning against the wall down the corridor where it spills into the cargo bay. "Now that we're all accounted for, what say we get this tin can off the ground, eh?" he asks Jack.

"The _Guardian _is _not _a tin can," Jack retorts, as though he has been personally offended.

"And great, you even _sound _like North," the Pooka replies, rolling his eyes. "Gods, I dunno how we're gonna survive two humans on the same ship."

Jack ignores this. "Give me some coordinates and I'll get you wherever you need to be."

"North's got those for you. And a bit more explanation, knowing him."

Jack nods and leaves them all behind in the dim hallway. As soon as he steps away, they fall into comfortable banter, their jovial tones spilling out behind him. Bunny's laughter (_Bunny's _laughter?) rings in the air. The sounds of their easy, familiar camaraderie irks him for some reason. Not for the first time, he wonders what he's gotten himself into.

.

What North has for Jack, as it turns out, is less of a professional explanation of his job responsibilities and more of an informal tea party in the industrialist's private cabin. Except that the tea is actually whisky served in tea cups ("Tooth does not approve, but she will not know right away, you see?" North explains with a wink), and North seems to want to talk more about Jack than about the job.

"Who _are _you, Jack Frost?" he wonders aloud once he has finished his whisky and his lengthy account of the merits of alcohol. He leans forward, setting his cup onto the saucer, which automatically stutters to life to cool the drink back down. "Where do you come from?"

"Uh, I thought you knew stuff about me already," Jack replies, sipping some of the whisky to conceal his tension. It burns his throat on the way down, and he splutters a little. "Business connections and all that."

"Is only rumors," North retorts, shaking his head. "But you are very strange boy, to become pilot at such a young age. If it weren't for your reputation, I do not believe we would be sitting here to chat. But rumors _say_ you can be trusted."

"You can trust me to do the job," Jack says firmly. "No matter what it is. I've never screwed up a job, and I don't plan to start now. But—look. If you don't mind, I'd rather not discuss where I come from. I don't think that anything about my past matters, and…I worked hard to become a pilot, and I'm the best at what I do. That's really all you need to know, isn't it?" As he speaks, he struggles to ease the stiffness from his spine. It's hard, being here with someone like _North, _the type of person he has hoped never to meet and whom he has always actively avoided. Businessmen make him uncomfortable, with their sly, knowing looks and deceptive offers. North doesn't seem anything like Jack expected—and neither do the others, for that matter—but he'd still rather not get too involved with them, especially on this particular subject.

Jack meets North's gaze resolutely, and the industrialist reluctantly nods and sighs. "Very well. But you are too serious for your age! Boys like you, they should be off learning to drive hovercar and learning interstellar cosmology in class still, not piloting their own spaceships!"

The pilot has never had any experience with either of those things, but he nods slowly anyway.

"Well," North begins, "The job, then. Is very simple, actually. In our spare time, the others and I are always researching and developing new technologies. However, recently, some of our research is beginning to disappear…a few documents here, a bit of data there. And we are beginning to be suspicious. We even send out workers to investigate, but when they return, they have nothing to share. And then, bam! All of sudden, stolen prototype for our next development. Is almost too much to bear—except that we can track it. And this time, we investigate by ourselves. You see, our device is implanted with signal that will broadcast coordinates, which I will give to you in cockpit. Is not far into the Reaches; I have already seen location. We find prototype, you get paid, easy peasy."

_Easy peasy _doesn't exactly take into account what happens between "we find prototype" and "you get paid," though. Jack has the feeling that whoever has the guts to steal data and an actual, physical _prototype _from NSN Industries and its affiliates isn't going to just hand it back over once North asks politely.

_That must be why they're looking for an experienced pilot, _Jack thinks warily. _In case they need to get in and out quick. _"So you're basically flying in blind, just the four of you, without knowing what you're dealing with, and you hope that whoever it is will give it back once you get there," he summarizes, half-hoping North will contradict him.

North barks a laugh. "Exactly that! Except that we have a few tricks up our sleeves. And we have you, of course. Do not underestimate a good pilot!"

Jack has a headache. He should have thought it over before accepting the job: these people are obviously insane, possibly suicidally so. On the other hand, if he survives this nuthouse, he'll be insanely well paid. And have his own ship, so there really isn't much of an argument.

He nods slowly. "If it's a strong enough signal, we should be able to track its broadcast with the onboard computers."

"Then what are we waiting for?" North booms. "Let's be off."

They head for the cockpit, North whistling cheerily as he leads the way. Jack hears the faint hum of a door opening, and he twists around to see who it is as they walk down the corridor. As if drawn by North's tuneless song, the other crewmates of this odd venture poke their heads out of their cabins and follow without a word.

Jack's still feeling a little tense from the discussion earlier, but as always, sinking into the pilot's chair soothes it all away. As North programs the onboard computer to trace the prototype's broadcasted coordinates, Jack busies himself by running a diagnostic of the ship's critical systems. He leans forward idly in his seat, watching through the window as a smattering of squat goblin dockhands toss their boxes into the cargo bay of a dazzling, four-winged S7 Trawler. Drumming his fingers against the console, Jack wonders how many times faster the _Guardian _is than even _that_ recent model, when a sudden notification pops to life on the glass display, hovering over his view of the ship in question.

"Not as far as I thought," he says, straightening in his seat as he feels the others gather behind him to take a closer look at the reading. "But still…"

"This will be a real trip," Tooth finishes for him as she and Bunny stare over his shoulder at the readout detailing the long journey to their target, which is nestled within one of the icy solar systems somewhere deep in the Reaches.

It will take them four or five days to even _enter_ the Reaches, the name for the trillions of light-years of wild, unincorporated space too far outside of the HAB Sector to be governed by the Intergalactic Coalition. Beyond that, they will need to pass the border planets, which, though technically part of the Reaches, still typically have some sort of local government or rule, ranging from semi-democratic in the case of Jack's homeworld of FS-12 to the monarchy of Punjam in the M64 Galaxy. Farther out into the black, the rules and regulations will become less and less defined with the dwindling number of long-term residents, until the_ Guardian _finally tumbles out into the _real _emptiness of space, the true Reaches, which stretch on infinitely in any direction and swallow the pebbly little systems of civilized planets with daunting vastness.

It should really take them over two months.

"About three weeks," Jack announces, having calculated the ship's top speeds, the effects of plasmaspheric winds, and the possibility of random IGC checks, "without stops for refueling."

He doesn't miss the shared incredulous glances at the declaration. "You're joking, right?" Bunny asks flatly.

"You asked me that earlier," Jack replies sweetly, swiveling in his seat to smile up at the irritated Pooka, "and I wasn't joking then either."

"Jack is pilot! He says three weeks, it takes three weeks," North adds hurriedly, in an obvious attempt to avoid the sort of banter the pair of them engaged in earlier.

"I still can't believe it's really come to this," Tooth murmurs suddenly, folding her arms as she looks at North. Sandy, half-dozing beside her, shoots out a series of symbols that Jack takes for agreement, if the sad nod is anything to go by. "We're leaving our companies to—to run themselves while we go off gallivanting around after some equipment—"

"They will not be _running themselves,_" North interrupts. "We have best of workmen—ah, and ladies, of course," he adds, nodding to the handful of fairies hanging in the air behind their sister. "And it is not _just_ equipment."

"North's right," Bunny adds, turning away from Jack. "We need to make sure our designs don't fall into the wrong hands, sheila. It's important to you. To all of us," he adds with a smile.

"Of course," Tooth replies, ruffling her feathers as though slightly offended at the implication that she is not taking _this_ (whatever it is) seriously. "It's just that…I didn't think _we'd _be going out there, not personally. Not when it came right down to it. I haven't been into the Reaches since I left Punjam, and to be honest, I—I've never wanted to go back."

Feeling as though he is intruding on a private moment, Jack frowns and turns back to the console as North murmurs some words of reassurance. Jack doesn't need to know—or want to know—what exactly he's been hired to find. A good pilot, especially in the line of work in which he usually finds himself, keeps his nose out of his employer's business unless told to do otherwise. Sometimes, knowing too much can prove fatal at the end of the mission for the more nefarious employers.

He's used to that part of things, to feeling like an outsider on board the ship of a tightly knit crew. What really bothers him, though, is that these people are so foreign to him that he doesn't know how to handle it. Tooth _never wants to go back to the Reaches? _That's all Jack has hoped for, all he's worked for since the last time he left them. Most of the smugglers he works with are of a similar mind, as the Reaches mean relative safety far from the eyes of the IGC. On one of his most recent jobs, running a cargo of illegal bushmeat for a team of nymph siblings, he wasn't even allowed to fly _into _the HAB Sector in the first place.

Sandy is patting Tooth's arm comfortingly, but Bunny has apparently had enough courtesy for one day. "At any rate, we'd best be off in case they decide to move the damn thing," he begins in a gruff voice. "We're all ready to go, yeah? What say we ship out, pilot?"

Jack's eyes flicker pointedly to North, who seems to be in charge of the whole venture. The industrialist nods, amused. The Pooka grumbles something under his breath_, _but if North's technically the one putting the credits into Jack's near-empty account, North's the one Jack follows.

Without another word, he powers up all of the ship's systems, feeling the machinery thrum to life beneath his feet. It is all so quiet, the tense coil of energy as the readings fill themselves out across the glass, that Jack can almost imagine he is alone.

For the second time that day, the dockyard guidance system informs him that there are no departing ships in his vicinity and gives him leave to take off. He pulls the_ Guardian_ up once more, away from the clamor of dockyard workers and into the murky air of Lorosov. He breathes a little easier a few moments later, once they have pulled out of the atmosphere and the black ink of space blots out the green Lorosov sky.

Once the excitement of their departure has begun to fade, Jack allows the computer to take control of most of the ship's systems as they jet toward their target. The icy, frozen waste stretches out around them in every direction; Jack can sense the draining coldness of the nearby cosmic bodies, knows their location probably better even than the onboard computers, and he is confident that he could sense even an oncoming solar wind if it grew too near.

Sometime while he was distracted with the liftoff, Sandy came to lean against the console at his elbow, staring at the window with wide eyes. Tooth has settled into the seat next to him, her expression conveying a similar state of wonder.

Sandy catches Jack's gaze and smiles lazily. A strange symbol snakes through the air above his head, an odd sort of spiral that curves into petal-like valleys. If Jack wasn't sitting here and didn't know the context, he might find it harder to make out its meaning. But as SCORPio disappears off to one side and the rest of the galaxy's stars spread out before them in a rain of wheeling magenta dust, Jack knows that Sandy's symbol must mean _beautiful._

"Gods, it is, isn't it?" Tooth smiles, her apprehension gone.

Jack grins and stares at the displays. He still doesn't know much about this temporary crew, not even with what little he knows from their extensive media coverage.

But in Jack's experience, anyone who pauses to marvel at the view from the shipboard windows can't be _all _bad.

**.**

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**A/N:** A few of you were confused by the last chapter's time jump, and Jack's still being pretty tight-lipped about his past, but a few glimpses into what happened in the past four years will be coming up in the next chapter…as soon as Jack can be convinced to share them :-)

In the meantime, thanks a ton to everyone who reviewed: KTrevo, I'm the lonely life, Daziy is SoniQ, Partying Painapple, Nikki Pond, Sunshinemoonpops, Nemaides. You guys are awesome!

Also, thanks to the guest reviewers to whom I couldn't respond:

RoseMirror: Thanks - glad you liked it!

Rozzie: I'm glad I was able to sway you into a new genre for a while :-) Hope this chapter lived up to expectations now that we've met Tooth and Sandy as well!

Guest TGS: Awesome feedback, thanks! It's definitely fun on my end coming up with this alternate universe, so hopefully I'm getting things across in a way that makes sense…I tend to leave things out by accident once I know my story too well :-) As for dear Jack, hopefully this chapter gave a better explanation of his piloting skills. He's relying partly on experience and partly on his unwanted superpowers in order to pilot so efficiently. And even though he's never gotten an _official _education, virtual reality (thanks to Sandy) is a pretty good teacher, I imagine! He's pretty reluctant to share info in general with people he doesn't know, but as he comes to rely on the others a bit more, they'll weasel some more info out of him!

If you enjoyed the chapter (or even if you really didn't), I'd love to hear about it. Please let me know what worked and what didn't, rant about how awesome Tooth and Sandy are, gripe about the pacing, etc. etc. Any feedback helps!

Next chapter: Frozen Cyborg with a Side of Gafflower Fritter. Stay tuned!

Till next time,

ket


	4. Gafflower Fritters with Frozen Cyborg

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**Four - Gafflower Fritters with a Side of Frozen Cyborg**

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One of the reasons Jack enjoys working as a pilot is that he gets to claim the cockpit as his own. Normally, the moment he steps inside one, the room becomes both his office and bedroom, as he's most comfortable camped out in the pilot's seat. A pilot's line of work is a solitary one, and Jack tries to make it obvious that he likes it that way. On most jobs, the rest of the crew lets Jack alone after he's politely refused a few invitations to the mess hall, leaving him free to steer or navigate or nap or pick his nose or whatever the hell he pleases without anyone breathing down his neck.

Not so with this particular crew, which doesn't seem to have any understanding of privacy.

But maybe Jack should have expected it. As surprised as he's been that they don't hold to his stereotypes of calculating industrial tycoons, it's still more shocking to see their behavior onboard. One week in, and Tooth and Sandy still hover near the cockpit windows, always gaping in awe at the views, and Bunny and North run their fingers (paws?) over _everything _until Jack has to snap for them to back away from the oxygen regulators or something equally essential.

"We are _scientists _at heart, Jack!" North laughs as the pilot glares. "It is interesting to see all of this up close. I do not believe I have ever been in a ship with such a small cockpit like this one, or without a bridge for viewing stars."

"The last one I was in was an interstellar cruiser the size of a city. But it's been a while since I've been out in the field," Tooth agrees, though her tone is more apologetic than North's. The fairy, Jack has learned, is the touchy-feely type, and she's apparently never learned the concept of a _personal bubble_. She runs curious fingers through Jack's snowy hair until he waves her away like a sheep flicking insects with its ear. "We just like to see everything."

"So you just hang out on SCORPio all the time?" he asks, mostly to distract himself from the mini-fairies inspecting the windscreen displays.

"Nowadays, yeah," Bunny responds. "There's always a lot to do. But none of us started out as research scientists, you know, so it gets a mite boring cooped up planetside."

"Why don't you just _leave SCORPio? _It's just research, and it's not like you don't have the credits," Jack adds, possibly overstepping his boundaries and into blunt rudeness. Mags would have elbowed him discreetly.

"It's not that easy," Tooth replies. "Even aside from the research, we all have other duties."

"Oh, right. Like your dental health thing?"

Tooth smiles. "Exactly. And we've all got things like that, programs that are closer to our hearts than the research. It's part of the reason we commissioned this ship."

"What do you mean?"

"It's the_ Guardian,_" Tooth explains. "It was a concept that all of us had a while ago, a way to try and give back. We all come from different backgrounds, but we've each seen how the universe needs to change. Maybe it's a little conceited of us, but we thought we were in a position to try and help. We've been calling ourselves the Guardians for a while—unofficially, of course—and setting up small funds or charity programs or other ways of helping. My income from the memory systems went into creating a public health fund, North and Bunny do their donations and giveaways, Sandy's profits let him spread his virtual reality machines to those who need it. It's just a way of making things a little better."

The enthusiasm in her voice is oddly endearing, but Jack thinks privately that they kind of suck as guardians of _anything. _Educating people about teeth and orchestrating video game giveaways are worthless, especially when the goods are distributed among inner HAB Sector planets like SCORPio, where people don't need the extra boost.

Jack thinks of his home world, so covered in ice that food is scarce even in summer, so isolated that the local Net barely covers the entire planet, so impoverished that starvation is a part of life. There's a reason Black Industries preys on border planets like his. Its people are so desperate for help and so far from communication or aid that their home becomes the perfect hunting ground.

Thinking of his home world, and of Mags still stranded on it, makes his mouth turn sour, and he keeps to his brooding, reflective silence long after the others have finally wandered off to bed.

.

_Winter thrashes FS-12, and the blizzard's winds scream against the sides of their wooden house. Jack and Maggie press themselves into the corner of the darkened living room beside the wood furnace, an orange glow streaming from the edges of its door to light Maggie's long hair and scrawny shoulders. Jack drapes a quilt across them as his sister fumbles with the tiny holo-comm, laying it on the floor to broadcast an old adventure flick into the air above it. Mags, looking up from the holo-comm, laughs at some stupid thing he says, her freckles dancing._

_The house is quiet and dark, but they have enough power stored for the alarm system, which wails in warning. Jack twists to see the weather alerts scrolling across the window display. He stands to deactivate it, the wind rattling the glass against his fingertips. When he turns back, Mags is smaller, thinner. Her hair shorter than his and sticking out in every direction as though windblown. The light of the furnace doesn't quite reach her, and she slides away into the darkness, frowning and with narrowed eyes._

_Jack lets her go. The snow breaches the laboratory window, streaming inside and plastering itself against the stark floors and walls, but it's not winter snow anymore, it's _his _snow. The lab techs scurry about like ferrets in their white coats, recording every second of it on clipboards of white paper. The only thing he can see through the snow is Pitch, a slippery smile over the ashen skin of his face. _He_ doesn't scurry. He watches. _

_Everything else freezes and is frozen; everything lightens to white. Even as his snow spreads and fills it all in, Jack still can't find the dark corner where Maggie sits._

_._

When he wakes, the curved cockpit window is covered in spirals of fern frost. Jack scrubs a hand across his face, thankful that his shipmates' circadian rhythms are still tuned to SCORPio's local time rather than standard intergalactic time, as the others are asleep in their cabins instead of around to witness.

His breaths are visible in the cold air, so Jack programs the onboard computer to raise the temperature, wearily rolls out of his chair, and crawls onto the console in his bare feet. He'd rather scrub the frost away before he has to explain this to any early risers. The soft blanket he pulled from the bed in his cabin does a decent job of clearing away most of the frost, and Jack is careful to avoid hitting any of the lights and levers as he hurries to clean the windscreen.

After a few minutes, he hops back down into his seat. _Lucky I was alone this time, _he thinks, though the damage could have been worse: he's had his fair share of indoor snowstorms. He hasn't had a nightmare in some time, though, so he supposes he was overdue.

The quiet of the cockpit is a comforting backdrop as they drift toward the Reaches, the gentle thrumming of the ship's fuel systems a lullaby in the dark. He turns down console's backlit panels so that the stars shine through the window more clearly, upcoming HAB Sector galaxies dusted in bright red and violet blooms across the skies.

Jack's thankful for a short amount of quiet. He's so used to isolation that the constant interaction with his shipmates wears at his nerves. _Now I sound like Mom, _he thinks darkly, turning over in the cushioned chair.

The fuel gauge, now at eye level, has sunk fairly low in the past few days. Jack yawns and pulls himself back up, closing his eyes briefly to sense the cold void outside the metal of their ship.

Within a few hours' flight is a small smattering of circumbinary planets in the Archal Galaxy, along with a lone rogue planet and a thick belt of asteroids and debris, all of these warm in comparison to the icy space between them. He checks the Nav Board, which backs him up on that. The Archal Galaxy is a well-known travel destination composed of three icy worlds used as ski retreats, a handful of moons cluttered with tourist traps, an ocean resort planet, and the planet Eskarth, which acts as a point of entry for travelers to the galaxy.

Jack taps his fingers thoughtfully against the compass. He's stopped there to refuel in the past. Their prices are decent—not like this crew needs to worry about it—and they _do _have amazing gafflower fritters.

Decision made, he edits their flight path and adjusts the wings for the upcoming descent, which may be a rocky one in Eskarth's mercurial atmosphere.

He's hesitant to disturb the quiet, but it's probably best to let the others know they'll be landing soon. Smirking, he presses the link for the onboard comm system. "Rise and shine, crewmates. This is your pilot speaking, and I'd like to welcome you onboard our flight out to the Reaches today. Once again, thanks for choosing Jack Frost's personal tour service. I'd just like to advise you that we will be making a quick pit stop on Eskarth for refueling and possibly also gafflower fritters. That is all."

It seems unlikely that any of the others have ever set foot on a public shuttle, let alone ridden one between planets, and less it's likely that they'll recognize a shuttle driver's customary introduction, but Jack couldn't help himself.

Tooth is the first to appear in the cockpit, just as they enter Eskarth's atmosphere. The pale white light of the planet's F-class sun filters through the window, streaming across dusty orange canyons and dark rivers that cut across the surface like veins.

"Gafflower fritters?" she asks, rubbing her eyes against the light.

"They're the best," Jack replies easily. "If you've never tried one, I'm doing you a favor."

Tooth sinks into the chair beside him. "Oh, wow," she says softly. "I've been to resort planets once or twice before, but I always forget how different they look. No skyscrapers or anything."

"I think they're just as populated as SCORPio here, but they like to make it look more natural," Jack agrees. "Eco-friendly and all that." He lowers the ship toward the planet's surface, following the massive, churning river that links Eskarth's major cities. The waterway is nearly a mile wide, bordered by fire-colored canyon walls that tower over the water, a more natural version of skyscrapers. Windows, stairs, and narrow walkways line the surfaces of either canyon wall, and the people moving up and down the levels look something like ants against the backdrop.

As they approach the area where the river empties out into a vast green sea, the flat plains above both sides of the canyon wall become dockyards, housing millions and millions of starships that gleam in the white sun. Even more of the glittering starships swarm in the open sky; Jack keeps a close eye out for them as they make their way to a refueling station. He finds one near the edge of the canyon and scans it for an available berth, taking them in low and settling the ship into place with ease.

"Alright," he says, locking them in. Sandy must have entered the cockpit at some point while Jack was distracted, because he ogles the world outside from his place at Jack's elbow. The pilot smiles. "Here we go."

Jack shuts off the power and opens the main door. He turns to clamber down the stairs and then takes the ramp outside, ducking under the metal hull to check that the refueling line has lowered into its outlet on the ground. North appears as well, walking over to the pad at the corner of the station for payment, or at least Jack assumes that's what he does. The man gets caught in a conversation with an amber-furred yeti attendant, and Jack doesn't see him take out his holo-comm to send over his credits, but the fuel begins to drain in either way.

For most of the larger starships Jack has ever flown, it takes a fair amount of time to refuel and to take advantage of a planet's natural sunlight long enough for the solar panels to store the maximum energy. Thanks to the _Guardian's _efficient solar cells and lightweight fuel tank, it should take them a little over an hour.

With that in mind, Jack finishes setting up and then slips from beneath the shady underbelly of the_ Guardian _and into the blinding sunlight, wincing almost instantly. He always forgets how hot it is here, especially with Eskarth's twin suns. The air is warm and sticky, humid in a way Jack has rarely felt on any other planet. He likes to think his intolerance of heat stems from his upbringing on the icy FS-12, where summers usually only mean crisp air and comparatively rare snowfall, but he's always had the sinking feeling that there's more to it than that.

"Alright!" Tooth chirps, heading down the ramp behind him. She holds an ornate, coral-colored parasol, and Jack quashes the mental image of a hummingbird with a flower. "I don't know about everyone else, but I'm going to stretch my wings a bit."

Sandy nods vigorously beside her and floats—legitimately _floats_—several inches off the ground in his excitement.

"C'mon, Toothy, we're on a schedule here," Bunny retorts, his voice echoing from within the hull of the ship. He appears in the porthole at the end of the ramp, frowning. "Stick by the ship, will ya? We can cast off as soon as she's done refueling."

"Jack says they have good gafflower fritters," Tooth pouts, smoothing back the feathers on her head. "Come with us. They're on me."

The Pooka wrinkles his nose. "Jack says—what in the cosmos is a _gafflower_?" Jack rubs his mouth with the back of his hand to hide his smile.

"Well—_I _don't know," Tooth laughs, "but let's try one while we're here! And besides, everyone says you're supposed to go down to shop on the pier on Eskarth—it's _famous, _Aster. Don't you want to come with us?"

"Think I'll pass, sheila," Bunny snorts, heading back onto the ship. "Just be back in an hour, alright?"

"We'll bring you something back," Tooth replies as he disappears inside. "Now, where's North—oh. He's found a friend." To Jack's amusement, she and Sandy roll their eyes simultaneously. "That man can talk the ear off of anyone, and he knows every yeti on this side of the HAB Sector," Tooth explains at Jack's expression.

Sandy grins and rattles off a few golden signals.

"You're right; let's not wait for him. Come on, Jack."

They meander to the edge of the station, where the ground drops away steeply toward the river below. A sequence of stairwells that appear to be carved into the cliff face trail down toward the waterway, pausing here and there in flat stretches to allow space for wide awnings and umbrella-laden balconies. Immense windows line each progressive floor until the walls sink into the sandy shoreline. Shops and small hotels dot the side of the canyon wall as well, all of them with scrolling, holographic advertisements in multiple languages advertising products, overnight rates, or even an air-conditioned interior to temper the sweltering heat.

Very far below them, the river is divided by an immense bridge lined on either side by the colorful rooftops and umbrellas of various attractions. Tooth leans against the railing. "That's much further than I thought it would be," she murmurs to herself. "I wonder if we can walk there and back in an hour."

Sandy tugs the hem of Jack's hoodie, and a few golden symbols spurt out. An arrow, a lumpy sort of dough, a question mark.

"Uh…yes?" Jack guesses. "They sell the fritters all along the pier." He shields his eyes against the warm sun, thinking that he's not sure he wants this badly enough to actually venture out into the blistering heat for so long.

Multitudes of personal shuttles whip back and forth through the stagnant air between the canyon walls, and among them, Jack spots a few silvery water nymphs flitting out toward the sea. The pilot glances at his new crewmates in consideration.

"Actually, guys, since you're both more…flight-equipped than I am, maybe you two should just go down there yourselves."

Tooth hesitates, leaning on her elbow against the metal rail. "I don't know, Jack. That doesn't seem fair."

"We're short on time," Jack reasons, "and if we all stick around, _nobody's_ getting any gafflower. Besides, it's kind of hot. I think I'm gonna find some shade."

Sandy smiles apologetically as he drifts upward. A glowing thumbs-up sign flashes above his head.

"We'll bring one back for you," Tooth adds, waving.

The two of them drift down the side of the canyon, Tooth's powerful wings glinting in the sun and Sandy sinking down as lazily as a leaf on the wind. Jack watches them until they're too far away to make out in the multicolored throng of tourists at the foot of the pier, and then he turns away.

Now that he's finally alone, Jack finds that he's not actually too keen on returning to the ship, where he'll have only a brooding Pooka for company. Instead, he weaves around a trio of kitsune and makes his way to the stone stairs. A hotel one level below sports a narrow balcony that juts from the canyon wall, a cool and quiet place with a single lane of tables shaded by broad umbrellas. Ignoring the dirty look the hotel concierge shoots his way, Jack wanders over and sinks into a seat, eager to be out of the suns.

_People must spend thousands of credits a night just to stay at a swanky resort like this, _Jack imagines, leaning into the metal railing to find a stunning view of the gorge below. Still, the area has always seemed off-putting to him. The floors and walls of the hotel, like all of the canyon structures, are a dusty orange with inlaid veins of red and yellow. All of it is meant to emulate the planet's natural stone and makeup, but the entirety of this canyon (and, in fact, the majority of the continent) is artificially created, a synthetic mountain raised out of the sea. Everything is so smooth and regular, each successive story dropping away in neat right angles like an enormous flight of stairs, that the area lacks the uncontrolled, creative flow of the Lorosov Nature Preserve—or better yet, the field outside Jack's house on FS-12.

Jack spends the better part of the hour watching the landscape below him, studying the assortments of shoppers venturing into the brightly lit stalls and hotels. Small collections of floating shops and multifunctional cargo ships drift languidly across the water, weaving through the pier's spiderweb of support beams. Jack thinks he can make out the faint percussive beat of selkie music farther upriver.

After a while, the crowds and music and odd fragrances begin to blend, warm colors melting together like the slow drip of an oil painting in the balmy summer heat. Drained by the humid air, Jack sinks into a light doze against the railing.

.

Sometime later, through half-lidded eyes, Jack becomes slowly aware of something that makes the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. Over time, and out of pure necessity given the relative danger of the smuggling profession and the stalking tendencies of Pitch Black, he's developed a sort of sixth sense (or maybe a seventh sense, considering his enhanced thermoception) that makes his nerves jangle almost painfully when he most needs to be alert.

Presently, a sallow-faced man with tufts of stringy grey hair is standing in the middle of the walkway below. The sleeves of his coat are rolled up to reveal that one of his arms is entirely mechanical, seams of electric blue running down the flinty steel.

It's not the arm that draws his attention. Everyone's entitled to do as they please with their own bodies, and Jack's seen a slew of cyborgs while smuggling meds and minerals and other goods back and forth through the Reaches. Something about a smuggler's job seems to attract those who make corrections to their forms, whether to strengthen it by lacing mechanized weaponry into their limbs or to replace parts lost in scuffles with the IGC.

It's the icy stare that frightens him. Jack draws a decent amount of curious looks for his unusual coloring; among humans, even considering interbreeding between species, the occurrence of white hair and pale skin and blue eyes in combination is almost nonexistent in people his age. But the cyborg's keen gaze is the calculating and hungry kind, the kind of gaze that Jack goes to any length to avoid.

There is a stairwell hewn into the smooth canyon face only a few yards away. Without taking his eyes off of Jack, the man inches purposefully toward it. Jack stiffens, rising slowly from his seat, and he doesn't need to look to know that the man begins to run as soon as he does.

He sprints away, though this route also takes him farther away from the_ Guardian. _A gaggle of dark-skinned women shrieks as he shoves his way past, taking the stairs two at a time and keeping to the narrow paths along the canyon wall. There are veritable oceans of people milling about a few stories below, and if Jack can only reach them, he can vanish into the crowd. Invisibility is one of his strengths.

His panted breaths hang heavy in the air as the sun beats down on him, but he doesn't dare look back to see if he's still being followed.

The foot of the canyon draws near as Jack twists away too late to keep from clipping the side of a jewelry rack with his shoulder. The trinkets scatter across the sandy pavement, but Jack only stumbles, rights himself, and continues on in spite of the shopkeeper's angry screeches. He's nearly there when he hears a shout of alarm behind him and something heavy slams onto his back, pinning him to the ground.

The man turns him over roughly, digging a hard knee into Jack's chest. As Jack struggles against the weight, he guesses that the man must have jumped from the story above—a risky move for most, but the heavy and unyielding strength of the knee crushing Jack's ribcage suggests that the cyborg's leg is mechanical as well.

"You can only be Jack Frost," the man mutters, his breath stale. "You know you're fetching a fair amount of coin these days, Frost? Somebody's looking for you real hard."

The words aren't meant for Jack, but for the frightened onlookers hesitating over the man's shoulder. Identifying Jack as a bounty—and everyone will assume it's an official _IGC_ bounty—turns him from a struggling kid to a juvenile criminal. It also means that no wannabe heroes will try anything stupid to interfere.

"Like I'm actually—coming with you," Jack grunts, attempting to wriggle from under the man's crushing weight.

"Didn't think you'd be _willing_," his attacker retorts with a sharp grin. He pulls what looks like a hollow, clear coin filled with green liquid from his coat pocket, and Jack has seen enough dermal infusers in his short life to panic upon the recognition. His arms shoot out automatically to catch the man's flesh wrist before he can press the infuser against the pilot's skin.

The man swears vehemently as they struggle, bearing all of his weight down upon Jack, but Jack fights like a cornered beast, knowing that if he allows himself to be knocked out by whatever drug is in the device, everything is over. "Fine," the man growls breathlessly, "we can do it the hard way." He crushes Jack's throat with his other arm, the metal unyielding as Jack chokes for air, his vision beginning to blur.

Panicking, Jack lets some of the ice within him pull to the surface, and the man begins howling in pain. He releases Jack's throat, shrieking as he claws at the pilot's clenched hands. "Get off, get _off!_" he screeches, his knee still crushing Jack's lungs. A crippling fear washes over Jack as he struggles, not so much of being captured but of whether he can curb his powers enough to escape the area without notice.

A quick blur strikes the back of the man's head, and Jack starts in panic as the stranger suddenly leans forward. Frantic, Jack pushes his arms against the heavy weight before realizing that the cyborg is limp across his chest, his eyes closed in unconsciousness.

"What the bloody hell?" a voice exclaims, and Bunny pulls the cyborg off of Jack and tosses him aside as if he weighs no more than a burlap sack. The Pooka catches something in one paw—_ah, so the boomerangs really _do _work, _Jack thinks vaguely_—_and peers down as the pilot gasps for air on the pavement. "You alright, mate?" Bunny asks, holding his paw out to help Jack to his feet. The pilot takes it and stumbles up as the Pooka hoists him forward.

"M'okay," Jack manages hoarsely.

The small crowd of bystanders is still gathered, a number of frightened yetis and humans and the odd water nymph. "What're you looking at?" Bunny snaps, irritated. "Move along."

They disperse warily, much to Jack's relief. "How'd you find me?" he asks, rubbing his sore throat. His mouth tastes vaguely of blood; he must have bitten his tongue.

The Pooka turns back to him. "You're late," he explains bluntly. "Went looking for you and followed the sound of shouting; wasn't hard. But what in the name of Gaia were you doing to his hand?" he asks, looking down at the unconscious figure spilled across the pavement.

Jack winces as Bunny bends down to prod the man's wrist incredulously. As the pilot expected, the length of the man's arm is covered in a thick crust of hoarfrost. Jack tries to figure out what to say as Bunny breaks the icy layer with a quiet _crunch _and sweeps it away. Underneath, the entire arm is so deep a blue it's nearly black, tinged in places with silvery grey where it peters off into a normal skin tone.

"Frostbite." Bunny turns to Jack, astonished. "What's this? Did _you_ do this?"

The question seems kind of stupid, and Jack can't help the nervous laugh that escapes. "What do you think?"

The Pooka's green eyes flicker up and down Jack's figure, but Jack's got no obvious technology on him save the pocket holo-comm peeking from the pocket of his hoodie. "How'd you do it?"

Jack shakes his head.

"Okay," Bunny grinds out. "Let's start somewhere else, then. Who was that?"

"An old acquaintance," Jack lies. Bunny raises one dark brow, staring back down at the cyborg, his eyes lingering here and there on the bulges of weaponry concealed under his pants and jacket. The man's got the look of a criminal, to be sure, with his ragged hair and weather-worn clothing, but so do most bounty hunters. Jack can tell that Bunny's mind is making the right connections by the suspicious frown growing on his face.

"Got any more _acquaintances _like that?"

"Dunno."

"Why was he after you?"

Jack shakes his head again.

"What'd you use on him?"

Jack rubs his eyes but doesn't respond. He doesn't know how to answer anyway.

Bunny growls, taking to his feet as he produces a pocket holo-comm from a pouch somewhere, and he pulls up the Net to scroll through a series of what looks suspiciously like contact information. "Let's get someone to tell us who this bloke is, then."

"If you're getting in touch with the IGC, I'd rather be gone before they come to pick him up," Jack says quietly, feeling too tired to deal with the fallout that's sure to follow. Bunny frowns in distaste, weighing Jack with his gaze for a long time, but when he finally swipes the screen closed, he wordlessly turns to lead the pilot back in the direction of the _Guardian._

The Pooka's shoulders are stiff, and his fur is bristling in poorly controlled anger. For his part, Jack feels strangely hollow as they retrace their steps, like more of him has been crushed than his neck and chest. As they trudge past the jewelry stand, he barely registers the renewed wave of shouts from the disgruntled shopkeeper.

Their mutual silence lasts until they've reached the ship, where Jack notes that someone has retrieved the fuel line and powered her up again. They clamber up the ramp, and Bunny jerks his head toward the private cabins and the cramped kitchen at the end of the hall, where the walls and appliances gleam in expensive titanium fittings and his crewmates sit around the retractable table.

Sandy is munching his gafflower fritter, a greasy bag of them folded shut on the table. The overwhelming smell of nectar and spices combined with the coppery taste of his own blood in his mouth makes Jack nauseous. "Jack!" Tooth cries as soon as the two of them duck into the room. "We were so worried—and your fritter's gotten cold…what happened?" she adds, looking back and forth between their identical solemn expressions. "Jack, your throat's all bruised."

"_Jack_'s got some explaining to do," Bunny grinds out, folding his arms and sinking into an empty chair, leaving the pilot standing alone with his back to the wall. "I just put in a call for an IGC cruiser to come out and pick up an _acquaintance_ who almost crushed this idiot's windpipe and then came out of their scuffle with a blackened hand, all covered in ice. Wouldn'ta believed it if I hadn't seen it myself."

"IGC—what are you talking about, Bunny?" North wonders aloud, leaning forward in his seat.

"I'm saying that your _pilot _must be on the wanted list after all. Just didn't see fit to tell us." He turns to Jack. "Planning on causing us any more trouble, mate?"

"I'm _not _on the wanted list—"

"I think it's about time you told us the truth about where you come from, Jack Frost," Bunny interrupts.

Jack's throat throbs angrily as he frowns, not willing to meet their gazes. "I'm not going to cause you any trouble," he says slowly. "What happened was—a really stupid, one-time thing. But it won't happen again, I swear, and it's nothing you need to worry about besides. It won't interfere with my work."

"It has already interfered with your work, Jack," North replies, gazing at him intently. "You are late. You were attacked. Is not your fault, but that does not change this. What else could happen?"

"You know what I mean," Jack responds, exasperated. "It's just—it's not something I talk about. Not ever. And it'll never come up again, I promise. I stick on the ship, get you guys where you need to go, and I take us all home."

Jack can see in the sympathetic openness to Tooth's and Sandy's faces that they are inclined to take his word for it. North frowns at him for much longer, hesitating, but Jack thinks he might let himself be persuaded in time.

It's the Pooka that refuses to budge. Once Bunny studies his friends, coming to the same conclusions as Jack has, he turns to face the pilot once more. "_They'll_ forgive you for this kinda thing," he allows, shrugging. "It's in their natures. But it's not in mine. To me, you're a selfish bloody bastard who wanted a job so bad he'd lie, jeopardize our work, maybe even put my best mates in danger over it. And unless you give me something to work with here, I'm gonna move that we scrap this little adventure and take out an ad for another pilot."

He raises his challenging gaze to the other inventors. "Tell me if you don't agree," he adds, "but I don't think it's worth it, taking a chance here like this. We don't know anything about him, 'cept he can stick a decent landing. For all we know, he could bring us trouble with the IGC just for having him aboard. And don't think I'll forget the stunt you pulled," he grumbles, turning back to the pilot, who is still frowning at his shoes, hoping he doesn't look as petrified as he feels. "I've never seen any weapon that can do what you did back there, and I've seen my fair share of tech." This, coming from someone in Bunny's line of work, is a massive understatement.

The others shift uneasily in their seats.

"You don't have to treat him like a criminal, Bunny," Tooth murmurs. "I'm sure this is some kind of misunderstanding."

"Misunderstanding or no, Toothy, perhaps it would be good idea for us to know more about our pilot." North's gaze is apologetic, but there is something firm in the slow clench of his fist.

Jack winces, worried about revealing anything about himself to these corporate entities. He feels backed into the corner, and, as always, his fear snaps out of him as anger and irritation. "Okay, fine," he begins, "let's try it this way: I'll tell you what I can, and you decide if that's enough for this to work." Bunny opens his mouth to speak, but Jack continues before he can get a word in edgewise. "No, I'm not telling you more than I want to, because to be completely honest? Most of this is because _I_ don't trust _you guys_. Not really. I've met people like you, people who think they've got half the credits in the galaxy, and that entitles them to say one thing and do another. People who use every little scrap of information they can get their hands on, who'd sell their own mothers if it cemented a business deal. I'm not telling you everything."

It's probably too harsh—Tooth looks vaguely offended, at any rate—but Jack raises his brows in question, looking around the room. Sandy, though obviously taken aback, is nodding slowly, his golden eyes darting back and forth between Bunny and Jack. Finally, Bunny nods. "Alright, then. Go on."

"Okay. I _am _on a wanted list—"

"Bloody _cosmos_, are you serious? That's what I've been _saying—_"

"_A _wanted list, not _the _wanted list, not the IGC one—"

"Bunny, will you be quiet?" Tooth snaps. "We'll be here all day."

"Thank you," Jack sighs. "As I was saying, I'm on _a _wanted list, not for the IGC or any kind of intergalactic authority, but on the list of—I guess you'd call him a smuggler. He's been out to get me since we—ah—didn't part on the best of terms."

"What'd you do, ya bushranger?" Bunny asks, rolling his eyes. "You steal from a smuggler?"

Jack smiles bitterly. "Guess you could say that. But it'd be better to say that he thought he owned something he didn't. When I left with it, he couldn't find it in his heart to let it slide," he quips. "Put a bounty on my head three years ago."

Sandy's signals flash above his head, his face incredulous. _Three years? You were fourteen, _Jack makes out, mostly because the images of numbers are easy to grasp.

The pilot nods curtly. "And if it helps, I didn't _ask_ to get involved with a smuggler. I wasn't given much of a choice."

The others stare at him. When the silence stretches on for too long, Bunny clears his throat.

"That it?" Bunny asks.

"That's about all I'm going to say," Jack agrees.

"Well—tell us something else," Tooth adds before Bunny can counter. "How did you manage to get onto a smuggler ship at fourteen? It doesn't make much sense. Didn't your parents—someone—have anything to say about it?"

Jack rubs his chin, figuring he can answer that one. Parts of it anyway. "I guess they would have said something if they'd known I was going," he replies slowly. "But I didn't tell anyone. We were short on credits, and it was an easy way of making some to send home."

"And finding a bandit ship is the best way you could think of to make some coin?" Bunny asks incredulously. "No honest jobs for Jack Frost, then."

Jack's fists clench at his sides, suddenly numb with cold. "I grew up on a border planet—FS-12 in the Glaciole Galaxy," he spits. "Dunno the last time you were out in the Reaches, but there are _never_ enough honest jobs to go around. We sold anything we could get our hands on, but there were never enough credits, never enough food. And sometimes the only way to put food on your table is to steal it from someone else's." This is a truth Jack has learned the hard way. It's been years since he's accepted the fact that if anyone's going to be doing the stealing, it ought to be him.

The vehemence in his voice seems to surprise the others. Bunny, at least, looks slightly mollified—though his eyes are still narrowed.

"A border planet?" North asks, steering them into gentler waters. "You did not grow up among interstellar pilots? I would have thought you had apprenticed before you could walk."

The thought of this makes Jack laugh. "I didn't even set _foot _on an interstellar ship until I was fourteen. And I didn't take up flying until a while after that. Turned out I had kind of a weird natural talent," he adds bitterly. "Though I wasn't lying about the training programs on your Dreamsand Virtual Reality System," he says, looking up at Sandy. "They helped."

Jack leans against the wall, the metal strangely cold at his back as the industrialists let everything sink in. The room is quite cool now, to Jack's alarm, and he makes a conscious effort to take a few calming breaths. Fortunately, no one else seems to have noticed the change in temperature: Bunny drums one foot thoughtfully on the floor as North and Sandy exchange unreadable glances.

"So…if that's all?" Jack says finally, wondering if he's still got a job or if he's going to be tossed out on Eskarth to find his way off-world again.

"What is name of smuggler chasing you?" North inquires, frowning suddenly.

Jack's mouth goes dry. "I'd rather not say."

"This part, I think, would be useful," North says slowly. "You tell us name, I can get my yetis—my _army _of yetis," he adds, winking, "to keep ears to ground. We will know which quadrants are safe, we will track IGC arrests and warrants."

It is very tempting, the possibility of having extra eyes to watch his back. But Jack can't find it within himself to make that leap, to trust these strangers with the knowledge he guards so closely. To them, Pitch Black is simply a fellow industrialist, the famed pharmaceutical genius, owner of a darkly reclusive tower in the western hemisphere of SCORPio where his mechanically-driven equines guard his research labs. He's one of _them,_ a powerful innovator with a peculiar knack for good business at low prices,and Jack is just a border planet shepherd with weird compulsion to run around barefoot.

"It won't matter," Jack replies firmly. "I'll stick to the ship from now on. If no one sees me, no one chases me. And after that—well, I'll be out of your hair, anyway."

North attempts to press, but Jack's resolve holds until the industrialist caves in at last. Even Bunny finally looks appeased, though he has one last question: "So what'd you use on the bloke, anyway?"

This is the question Jack has feared the most, but he brushes it off, hoping that he has given the Pooka enough information for one day. "C'mon, Bunny. I can't just hand out _all _my secrets." Jack keeps his smile mischievous, his tone the perfect combination of playful and steely, but he's tense as he waits for the response. Knowing Jack's past, Bunny should assume that he's used some strange or even illegal device, one whose origin he doesn't want to share.

After a searching glance, Bunny shrugs wryly and jerks his head toward the door, sighing. "Fair dinkum. Alright, pilot. Get this tin can back into the air."

Grateful, Jack nods and heads off. One day, maybe, Jack will be able to tell them the truth about Pitch. One day when their trust in each other is less new, less fragile. But until then, Jack doesn't know which prospect is worse: that they won't believe him about Pitch Black, or that they _will._

.

.

.

**A/N: **Poor Jack. All he wanted out of life was privacy and some decent food, but I guess we don't always get what we want. But at the very least, he's not in the hands of a bounty hunter, thanks to our favorite Pooka!

Thanks so much to everyone who reviewed the last chapter: KTrevo, C1nd3r5, OntheRun246, Sunshinemoonpops, Taylor Devline, Daziy is SoniQ, theblankgirl, I'm the lonely life, and MugetsuPipefox!

Also, thanks to guest reviewers whom I couldn't thank earlier:

Rozzie: Awesome! I'm really glad the characters are coming across well – they almost have minds of their own at this point :-)

Guest TGS: Sword Art Online is the BEST, and that's totally what I was imagining with Jack in the Dreamsand Virtual Reality System. I don't think that's something we'll ever get the chance to see in the story, but I'm glad my mental image came across a bit :-) And I actually have a small sort of working glossary/dictionary for my own purposes as I write, so I'd be more than happy to post that in the end to give a little more description about this universe! Also, tbh, North's "tea" party was pretty much one of my favorite things about that chapter, so I'm glad you liked it as well. Thanks again for the awesome feedback – you always make me feel so much better about my writing!

If there's something you liked/disliked about this chapter (or if you just want to say hello), leave me a note – any constructive feedback is welcome and encouraged!

Next chapter: A Dinner with the Sandman

Peace out,

ket


	5. Dinner with the Sandman

.

**Five - Dinner with the Sandman**

**.**

"Tooth, seriously. I feel fine," Jack protests for the _n_th time.

"Well, you look like you came out on the wrong side of a debate with an ogre," Tooth replies plainly. "Hold _still _for a second."

The pilot sits on the retractable chair in her private cabin, which is identical to his in design if not in décor. Tooth's room is bathed in warm colors, with draped fabrics and latticed wall hangings and a strange faux-natural light shining from above. It reminds Jack of temples and shrines he's seen in his travels. According to Tooth, it reminds her of home.

"Jack," Tooth sighs, lowering the antibacterial cleanser as the pilot shimmies away again, "I think this will go faster if you stop fidgeting so much."

_Is there a polite way of saying, "Back off, you're too close?" _Jack wonders irritably. Aloud, he grumbles, "Alright, yeah. Sorry. Just not used to having someone patch me up. And anyway, how am I supposed to do my job if you drag me out of the cockpit?"

"Jack, you've been flying for four hours. Thirty minutes on autopilot between systems isn't going to kill us." Tooth smiles apologetically. "I'll make it quick."

He allows her to lean forward with her supplies, which include a handheld regenerator (_handheld!—_Jack can't even _imagine _how much that must have cost, considering that he's never so much as seen a stationary one before he left FS-12) that hums as she slides it over the bruises on his neck. Jack turns his head away, wondering what it says about him that, unlike most guys his age, he's less interested in having a fairy so near and more wary of having someone closer to his neck than he allows most people.

The little hummingbird-fairies distract him from the thought. He watches them flit about the room, darting back and forth between the displays on the walls, which show what Jack imagines must be Tooth's home, as the colors and natural light look similar in style to the design of this cabin. The little fairies chirp as they relay information to each other and to the fairies on the live feed, swiping their tiny wings across the screens to move from one fairy to the next.

It's all very confusing to Jack, who feels a little disoriented watching them spin about so quickly, but Tooth seems comfortable in the chaos. As she covers the last of his bruises, she alternately mutters under her breath and corrects her fairies aloud ("That much energy would be nice, but as it stands, the system can't take that kind of overload" and "If we're going to keep the specs competitive in the current market, we'll have to consider updating, even at the last minute.").

"Done?" he asks hopefully as she leans away to inspect her work.

"Almost. You've got a cut under your jaw too; his arm must have scraped it."

Jack groans. "Tooth—"

"You were injured on the job for us. We don't have a medic on board, but I'm used to this. Just let me fix it, Jack."

He sighs but obligingly settles back onto the seat as Tooth grabs the bandage. The pilot expects her to return to her weird half-conversation with her helpers, but she frowns at him instead.

"Does this kind of thing happen to you often?"

Jack tenses, but he tries not to let it show. If she feels him stiffen under her fingers, she says nothing. "Just every once in a while."

"Well, _that's_ evasive," she retorts, shaking her head. "But I suppose we've pried enough for one day. It's just that you're really young to be getting this kind of treatment, especially more than once."

The pilot smiles coolly. "I can take care of myself."

"I'm sure you can," Tooth responds softly.

Time for a blunt change of subject. "You and your fairies are busy," he remarks offhandedly. "Must be hard having to work on projects when you're so far from each other."

"It is a little odd," Tooth admits, accepting the diversion. "I'm used to being _in _the factory, being able to see and touch everything they're doing. It's one thing to see it on screen or to hear about it and another to actually _be _there. I'm not sure I could work from a distance for too long."

"All of it sounds really complicated," Jack adds. "Not that that means much coming from me. I don't get any kind of technology outside of a ship engine and solar panels."

Tooth looks amused. "Well, we've actually been trying to keep it under wraps for a while. You know how competitive the tech field can be."

"Right," Jack replies. The statement is vague, but he imagines that he isn't exactly first on anyone's list of people who can be given sensitive information, considering how he's just shown them all how little he can be trusted.

"But that only means that everyone already knows the direction we're going, thanks to the press," Tooth adds, laughing. Her voice grows oddly dreamy as she presses the bandage to his skin. "Besides, it's not like it's some kind of huge secret or anything. Wisdom Teeth and its memory storage systems are the latest breakthrough in developing technology, but every major company on SCORPio has its eyes on the same prize now: genetic modification systems. People already do mechanical modifications like the ones on the 'acquaintance' who attacked you, but just think about what _genetic _modifications could mean for us—especially if they're done in connection with a health advocacy organization like mine! We'd have the ability to rid people of diseases, to confer only beneficial traits. All of the congenital disorders we treat now would become a thing of the past."

Tooth is almost bouncing with excitement. "Every race and culture has been dreaming of that kind of technology ever since we first turned our eyes up to the stars. And now, after so much effort, it's close—_really _close. We're right at the threshold and getting closer every day. I almost have the feeling that I can touch it. Like the entire universe is just holding its breath while we wait for this thing we've dreamed of for so long."

"Right," Jack echoes, his throat dry. "Genetic mods. I always thought that was just science fiction crap."

His tone is harsher than he meant for it to be, and Tooth, who has finally finished fiddling with his bandage, leans back to study him curiously. "I know it sounds crazy, but believe me; we're almost there. A few years, or maybe even months—"

"No, I—believe you. I do. It's just…do you really think it'll be that easy?"

Tooth's expression becomes warm. "Well, I never said it would be _easy. _But that doesn't mean we won't try. To be honest, I've been dreaming of this ever since I was young, being able to help people in such a tangible way, and to be so close to actually getting there…well, we're still trying to work out the kinks, the others and I, but it seems more and more possible every day. North and Bunny and Sandy—they've all jumped on board to get us there together, and I know we're going to make it."

"How—how close is 'close?'"

The fairy's expression drops into a scowl. "Well, I say we're getting close, but the truth is that we were closer a few weeks ago. We were finally able to funnel all of our research into the construction of a prototype mechanism we would theoretically be able to program to modify a specimen's genetic makeup, but before we were even able to complete it…Bunny probably won't like me telling you this, but _that's _the main research that was stolen. All of our files and data as well, but it's the prototype we're after. Years of development thrown away like that, and we're dealing with a pretty big blow right now."

The room is stiflingly warm, and the colors overwhelm his senses until Jack's mind stutters to a halt. He stares at Tooth. It's funny; based on her expression, she genuinely thinks that her work is actually going to _improve_ lives. And she really doesn't even _look_ like she's insane. Jack has a vision of himself grabbing her by the shoulders to yell at her that _this is genetic modification _and maybe if there's something you don't want to mess with, it's the cosmos, which has a funny way of coming back to bite you.

Instead, he jumps to his feet. "I'm gonna go up to the cockpit," he blurts instead.

Tooth stands slowly. "Oh. Do you—"

"No! Uh—thanks for, um, the bandage and everything. I'm just a little tired, I guess. Gonna go…rest up."

"Okay," the fairy replies, her violet eyes large and bewildered. Jack spins around steps into the corridor before he can change his mind. He strides down the lighted hall and takes the stairs two at a time.

_I knew I never should have taken this job,_ he thinks to himself, collapsing into the chair as the stars flit past outside the window. He takes the ship off of autopilot, glad to have something to do with his hands. _I knew it—there's been something weird about them from the start, and this job was too good to be true. Who the _hell_ offers an entire ship as payment, anyway? Are you an idiot, Jack?_

He forces himself to take a deep, steadying breath. The Guardians—because that's really what they're calling themselves now, no matter how stupid the name sounds—are not insane. Not _criminally_ insane, anyway. They're just…misguided. They must be, to think that genetic modification can lead anywhere but straight to hell.

They're the last people he'd consider to be underhanded, but that doesn't keep him from wondering what they'd do if they knew how extensive his firsthand knowledge of genetic modification is. For a project they've been slaving over for decades, Jack thinks they'd be unwilling to let him leave so easily. Not without first picking his brain, and, if worse comes to worst, picking apart his body.

A shudder races through him when he recalls that he had considered telling them about Pitch Black. He's never been so grateful for sticking to his only rule: it's every man for himself, so trust no one.

It's a rule he's only broken once. Two few years ago, when Jack had just managed to slip out from Pitch's grasp and under the radar, back when he was just starting out as a pilot, the warning of the fresh bounty Pitch had no doubt put out for him still thrummed in the back of his mind. At the time, he had been flying under Captain Nuada, a practiced smuggler with a shock of slick red hair, an accent that made him constantly sound one degree shy of furious, and the obsessive tendency to swipe expensive leathers and shiny minerals. Still, his bold, no-nonsense manner had kindled an odd sort of respect in Jack, who had confessed to him (under the influence of an alcohol much more potent than any taste he'd ever had on FS-12, to be fair) exactly _how _the mess hall had gotten to be covered in a foot of snow.

This, of course, meant confiding how Jack had abandoned his dying homeworld for the promise of work with the Collectors, a division of intergalactic conglomerate Black Industries. The word "work," as it turned out, had been intentionally misleading; the things the corporation really pursued were experimental guinea pigs and forced servitude.

Now, Jack's fists clench around the throttle. That part still sounds insane, even to his own ears. And he really doesn't want to think about it.

What he does think about is Nuada. He thinks about the way the redheaded captain had listened kindly, nodding at all the appropriate moments and asking careful questions, from what Jack can remember through the alcoholic fog, and how the man had helped Jack make it back to bed like he was five instead of fifteen.

The next morning, the pilot caught him searching the bounty lists for the name Jack Frost.

"It's only business, kid," Nuada had laughed at Jack's frozen expression. "And a reward's a reward, after all—don't take it too hard. Out here in the black, you're on your own. It's every man for himself. Looks like you forgot."

The captain had counted on the fact that Jack was trapped within the ship until they touched down onto their destination planet. Jack had counted on the fact that Captain Nuada was too selfish to share such a prize with anyone else and wouldn't tell reveal to his crewmates the source of his incoming windfall.

Nuada had maneuvered around Jack by programming his ship into autopilot—a terrible idea for a descent into a stormy world like the one they were landing in—and locking Jack in his cabin. Jack had outmaneuvered Nuada by knowing his ship inside and out, better even than its owner. It was no trouble at all to crawl through the panel that slid away from the retractable bed and into the adjoining cabin, scaring his neighbor out of his wits.

And it was no trouble at all to watch Nuada gasp for air as he drifted away into the stars, the result of an unfortunate malfunction of the ship's escape hatch.

Sometimes it bothers Jack how little trouble that was for him. He remembers watching Nuada's bulging eyes and swelling skin through the porthole, aware that the captain's blood was bubbling in his veins, that all oxygen had ripped out of his collapsed lungs, that the radiation from nearby stars would soon destroy his body, that the icy shade of space was freezing him to death—not by Jack's own hands, but freezing him to death all the same. Sometimes, it feels like the same thing. Jack has never been able to decide what to think about it, the detached emotion of watching a man freeze with the coldness of someone watching a worm wriggle in burning sunlight.

Sometimes, Jack wonders if it's possible to blame that part of him, the part of him that killed a man in cold blood, on the alterations Pitch made to his mind and body. He'd like to believe so, but he'll never know for certain. It drives him mad that he doesn't know what's his and what's Pitch's anymore.

In his anxious daze, Jack has been staring down at the Nav Board for some time without really seeing it. Flashes of Pitch and his laboratory snap him into sudden recognition, and he blinks in disbelief.

"That's not possible," he murmurs, tapping the screen like some idiot neophyte who thinks the motion might change the readout. "There's no way…"

Although North programmed their destination into the computer, Jack hadn't looked at it too closely. The Reaches are literally infinite—as far as exploration has revealed, the farther out you go, the more there is to them—and the chance of Jack recognizing any one location is infinitesimal. Yet their destined galaxy is familiar: the Kambaba Galaxy, named for its floating black holes and dusty swirls, an enormous and extremely dark region with only a handful of stars. Eerie green clouds of glowing oxygen drift throughout the void, occasionally floating close enough to be swallowed by the vast black hole at its center.

It's a miserable place, but life in the cosmos has spread as far as a starship can fly, and some of the pebbly planets within the Kambaba Galaxy are inhabited all the same.

Jack knows that better than anyone else. The glowing marker blinks just above the planet BL-413, a tiny, dark planet that according to any of the IGC's logs is home to small mining villages. True as that may be, Jack's more familiar with Pitch Black's end of the planet, the part with vast laboratories built into the mountainsides and a security system tight enough to keep out even the IGC, should they ever get their thumbs out of their asses and figure out what's going on.

The marker indicates this area as their destination, but Jack _knows _it's impossible. The last time Jack's feet touched that planet, he'd frozen the buildings and surrounding area so solidly that the computer screens cracked, lab techs who didn't move quickly enough froze in their tracks, and even the rooftops were buried under several feet of ice. Jack's first major use of his genetic mod was an act of destruction so powerful that he'd created a veritable glacier in the place a building used to be. Unfortunately, Pitch obviously escaped—in an apparent act of vengeance, he's been sending bounty hunters after Jack for years—but his entire horrible operation was destroyed. Nothing can have been salvageable. Nothing can have taken its place.

Jack pokes the screen again.

.

It takes Jack almost a full week to bring the information to the Guardians. In that time, he confines himself to the ship during refueling stops—no sense in attracting more trouble—and keeps mostly to himself, holing up in the cockpit and politely rejecting invitations to play cards or toy with the holo-comms to pass the time. Spending time with a crew is uncharted territory for him, and the interaction just exhausts him. Besides, he has no desire to get to know any of the Guardians better than he already does, only to make it through this job in one piece.

"A pilot's life is busy, yes?" North replies cheerily, undeterred by Jack's latest refusal. The pilot nods, but in reality, Jack now hovers over the Nav Board day in and day out, hoping that the tracker will reveal itself to be on a ship and begin flying across the cosmos.

When it doesn't, he finally caves in and drags Bunny and North, the self-appointed heads of the mission, up to the cockpit.

Bunny folds his arms across his chest to glare at one of the Kambaba Galaxy's rare stars. Jack leans forward in his seat to rest his chin on the console as he waits, listening to the windscreen's hum as its incredible filtering properties render the window's image safe for their eyes, shielding them from intensity, heat, and radiation alike.

"I don't get it," Bunny says suspiciously, eyes slanting toward Jack. "Why would the prototype be all the way out _there?_"

"Don't ask _me,_" Jack retorts, closing his eyes. "I didn't program the coordinates."

"I programmed it based on reading from tracking device," North protests from the navigator's seat, checking and double-checking the location. The pilot waits more patiently than he feels, but he can hear the Pooka begin to pace behind their chairs. "This is correct," North adds finally, his tone nonplussed. "The tracker has lead us here. It _must _be on planet."

"That's impossible," Jack says irritably. "Like I said, I've _been _in this sector before; I've even been to that planet. There's nothing there. It's all frozen. Even their sun isn't hot enough to defrost it."

"All the more reason for thief to hide here! Who would be looking?"

"Yeah, but _here, _North?" Bunny retorts, the sound of his footsteps halting. "All the way in the blooming Karaba Galaxy—"

"Kambaba. Like the stone," Jack corrects.

"—_whatever_ it's called! This place is distant even for the Reaches! I mean, this is the _last_ named galaxy in this direction. Past this, it's all technically 'unexplored territory,' no matter who's living there. You'd have to be a bloody drongo to be out this far—it takes a full _three days _just to send a _message_ back to the HAB Sector!"

The pilot opens his eyes only to roll them up toward the ceiling. He gets that delayed information transferral might seem like an incredible drawback. FS-12 took even longer to relay messages, and Jack survived his early years on _that_ lonely hunk of ice.

"Maybe our best shot is to just go take a look," Jack mutters, hardly daring to believe his own words. He exhales slowly, reassuring himself with the mental image of Pitch's fortress frozen under feet of solid ice. As stupid as it undoubtedly is, a part of him just wants to be sure Pitch's plans are still as crippled as he believes. And if not, to figure out whether Jack will need to find a way to take the operation out if it comes down to it. "Like I said. There's _no way _anything's there, but what else are we supposed to do? Turn around and go back?"

North shakes his head. "You are right. Keep a steady course, Jack."

"Aye, aye, Captain," Jack replies under his breath.

.

The Kambaba Galaxy is one of the largest known galaxies, spanning billions of light-years across, and it's more than wide enough to swallow Jack's relatively tiny home galaxy several thousand times over in its girth. It will take the_ Guardian _several days more to reach the solar system housing BL-413. Jack plans to spend most of this time as he has been, stretched out in the cockpit and occasionally dozing off in the radiance of the galaxy's gloomy green mist. There's little to do at this point but monitor and adjust their flight-path—certain types of black holes and smaller planetisemals are difficult for even the computer to recognize until they are quite close, and so Jack spends a fair amount of time guiding the starship around potential threats and obstacles.

The pilot abandons his post infrequently to make use of his bathroom and shower or to sneak meals from the kitchens, but for the most part, he feels far too anxious to eat much. A few hours after his discussion with Bunny and North, Jack is slumped tiredly against the console. Over the last two weeks, his sleep schedule has finally adjusted to intergalactic standard time, but it doesn't make sleeping any easier. It's two or three in the morning, but Jack can't make it past a light doze. He tosses uncomfortably in his makeshift bed—which is just the pilot's and navigator's chairs swiveled to face each other—and blearily cracks his eyes back open to wonder which of the specks in the distance belongs to Pitch.

Gradually, a soft glow warms the steely shades of the darkened cockpit. Jack straightens, dragged from his doze by the sudden fear that they have wandered too near the gravitational pull of an unexpected star or black hole. It takes him a minute to realize that the faint glow is coming from behind him.

He turns in his seat to find Sandy standing in the doorway, bearing two steaming plates and a wide smile.

"_Quasar_, Sandy," Jack says, retroactively trying to pretend like he hadn't been a second away from screaming. "You really know how to scare a guy. You training to be an interstellar assassin or what?"

Sandy smiles mischievously, and images whirl above his head too quickly for Jack to make them out.

"Didn't catch that," Jack admits, watching curiously as the stout little man approaches." But you've already got that 'silent' part down, you know?"

At this, Sandy's grin becomes toothier, and a golden dagger materializes in the air above his head. It vanishes as the man jabs a panel with his elbow and a tray slides out of the console so that Sandy can deposit the plates, both heaped with rice and warm, grilled vegetables, on top of it. From somewhere in his robes he produces two forks and holds one out to Jack with a firm, no-nonsense look on his face.

Uncertainly, Jack takes the utensil. "Uh…did we have a dinner date I didn't know about?"

Sandy replies in his customary whirl of sand, but Jack can't make anything out. At the pilot's blank expression, Sandy sighs and pauses in thought. After a moment, he points at Jack, and a golden drumstick forms in the air before the sand crosses an X through it.

"That's…probably supposed to be really basic. Um, _me? _I…no chicken. Food. I don't have food?"

Sandy wiggles a hand back and forth. Almost, then.

"I…oh, I don't _eat _food?"

At this, the inventor's head bobs enthusiastically. He gestures to Jack's fork.

"Sandy, it's _the middle of the sleep cycle._"

Sandy lifts one eyebrow. He points at Jack, and above his head forms the image of a person lying prone with a trail of Zs above their head. An X crosses through it.

"I'm not asleep," Jack interprets slowly. "Well, neither are you. And I don't get why that means we need to eat right now."

Sandy flops into the navigator's seat, gives a long-suffering sigh, and repeats his earlier symbols. _You're not eating. _

Jack's not sure what he did to deserve a stubborn inventor invading his cockpit to add to his insomnia, but he figures that the best way to get rid of him is probably to just go with the flow. Besides, of all of the Guardians, Sandy's been the most relaxed and the least pushy. Jack might have been less receptive to any of the others.

At any rate, the man is already nonchalantly eating his own plate, and who's Jack to stop him now?

The silence stretches on between them for a few minutes, both of them picking at their food and watching the dark swirls of distant black holes approach through the mist. After a time, Sandy smiles and a symbol appears above his head, the same odd, flowery spiral he'd made once before. _Beautiful._

"It is, isn't it?" Jack says, leaning forward in his seat. "It's weird, because it's not like other galaxies. It's so dark with all the black holes. And dangerous, I guess, but still…"

Sandy gives the pilot a sidelong glance before furrowing his brow in thought. He sets down his fork and points at Jack, and then hesitant shapes begin to form in the air: a small starship and a strange sucking vortex.

"Is that supposed to be a black hole? And me?"

The inventor nods.

"Uh…I've seen them before, if that's what you're asking. Flown past them."

The starship drifts very near the golden funnel, shudders, and darts away in the other direction.

Jack grins. "Oh, you heard about the event horizon thing? Yeah, I managed to get out of one once. Not something I'd ever really want to do again unless I had to—it was scary as hell—but I could probably do it."

Sandy grins appreciatively and wiggles in his seat. The next symbol is a golden, five-pointed star. Another X crosses through it.

Jack shakes his head. "Uh…no gold star for me?" he guesses, remembering the tiny stickers the schoolteacher on FS-12 had used when trying to teach him manners, which Jack hadn't really taken to anyway. "Was that not right?"

The little man's mouth opens in silent laughter, his shoulders quivering as he shakes his head. This time, he points at himself and repeats the symbols.

"No gold star for _you?_" Jack laughs sheepishly. "Wait—you're…are you talking about what I asked before? You're saying you're _not_ a star?"

A check mark. A streak of golden sand appears, the grains drifting away to form a tail and give the illusion of movement.

Jack's beginning to like this game. "A comet? You're a _comet_?"

Sandy beams and gives him a thumbs up.

"No way—really?" Jack asks excitedly. "How is that possible? How do you even make that work? Oh my god, can you survive out there in space? Without a ship, I mean?"

He wiggles his hand back and forth. _Sort of. _Sandy points at himself again, and the image of a floating rock appears. The sand on one side rises up into a small but unmistakable house.

"A dwarf planet…or, no, smaller. An asteroid?" Jack guesses. "You live on an asteroid?"

More houses, joined by two more floating rocks.

"All of you, I mean all the people like you live on an asteroid? Or…on lots of asteroids?"

Another thumbs up.

"That would explain why I've never seen anyone like you before! I mean, I've never actually been to an asteroid, and I guess you guys must keep to yourselves..."

Sandy nods vigorously.

"So then what brings you out here?"

The inventor pauses, expression blank, before grinning and gesturing vaguely with his arms in a wide shrug. Jack takes the gesture to mean _a little of everything _or maybe _too much to explain, _because an array of symbols begins flaring above his head, some of them recognizable and some of them too abstract.

"Whoa, whoa, okay!" Jack laughs. "Maybe guessing can only take us so far. I'll probably get better at this," he adds, before realizing that the time he gets better at understanding Sandy's language, they'll be going their separate ways. It's really for the best, but he hadn't expected the thought to send a twinge of regret through him.

Sandy does his silent laughter again. He looks at Jack thoughtfully and points to him. A question mark forms above his head.

"Me? What about me?"

A house forms in the air, minus the asteroid, and then another question mark.

"I told you guys, I come from FS-12. Way out in the Reaches, in the Glaciole Galaxy."

Sandy shakes his head. He points down.

"Uh. My home…is here?"

Sandy laughs silently and shakes his head again. Jack waits patiently as the man thinks. Finally, letters and numbers float into existence next to the house: _SIT 03:12, _or the current hour in standard intergalactic time.

"My home…at this time? Now?" Jack asks, deflating as he realizes what Sandy is asking. "Where is my home now?"

Sandy nods.

"You know," Jack replies, turning away to pick at the last of his food. "Back on SCORPio."

A bigger question mark appears.

"I don't—I don't really want to talk about it, Sandy," Jack says.

The inventor frowns, and for a moment, Jack fears that he's offended him. But Sandy just gives the pilot a troubled look. An abstract, unidentifiable symbol that looks like intertwined branches hovers in the air for a moment and crosses itself out.

"I don't know that one," Jack says in bewilderment. Sandy shrugs, smiling sadly. Without another word—image, rather—the man hops from his seat, the faint, luminous glow dancing with the movement. He prods Jack in the side and points toward the darkened doorway leading to the corridor.

"What is it?" Jack asks, setting his plate aside. The man just points again, a golden arrow whirling into the air above his head for emphasis. "Uh—okay."

The metal floor is cold against the pilot's feet, and he has only a moment to wonder if this is a grab-your-boots kind of outing or the more relaxed kind. Jack shrugs. It's three in the morning, and they can't exactly go far.

He follows Sandy down the narrow walkway. Soft lights blink to life overhead as they approach and extinguish themselves when they've passed. Sandy stops him at the door to Jack's own room, pushing Jack forward so that the sensors to recognize him and open the door automatically.

"What are you…?" Jack trails off as Sandy turns to face him with a determined expression on his face and images ready: a person lying prone, a trail of Zs, SIT 12:00. Even Jack can guess this one. "You want me to sleep 'till twelve?" he asks, amused.

Sandy nods, folding his arms across his chest.

"Since when did you become the ship mother?"

The little comet grins, makes a fist, and pats his bicep.

"I see," Jack grins. "I'll sleep 'till seven," he argues. "And I'll have to set the ship to autopilot. But if we pass a black hole—"

An X, SIT 11:00, an eye. Sandy points to himself.

"Ten, and that's my final offer. What's that last thing?"

A funneling golden hole, an eye. Sandy points to himself again.

"You'll…eye…you'll keep an eye out? Do you even know how to put the ship on autopilot?"

Sandy shrugs and grins. He pushes Jack toward the wall, pressing a button so that the panel slides open to fold into a bed. "Alright, alright—I didn't know manhandling was in the job description," Jack grumbles, not unkindly. "I'm not even tired."

He pretends not to see the glower directed at him. Sandy backs out into the hallway to allow him to settle in, but he turns around before the door slides closed to jab his finger at Jack again. _SIT 10:00_, he reminds him.

After a moment of half-bewildered staring, Jack strips and collapses onto the bed. For all of his objections, falling asleep more quickly than he thought possible.

This time, he doesn't dream.

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**A/N: **Soooo…I'm not overly fond of the way this chapter turned out, but I've reworked it so many times that I can't really look at it anymore. Which sucks, because you guys have been AWESOME about leaving reviews – so I'm starting to feel a bit more pressure to get it right! Hopefully, even though it's more of a transition chapter, it turned out okay. The action won't really start until next time!

Thanks, as always, for all of your support! Here are a few shout outs to guest reviewers whom I couldn't thank by PM:

Rose Mirror: Muchas gracias! I definitely wanted to have the characters as true to themselves as possible, so it's good to know the characterization comes across well :-D

Guest TGS: Same here – the first part of SAO was amazing, but I haven't been very much into the latest developments…maybe sometime in the future. And I _definitely_ appreciate the constructive criticism – it's always super helpful, and while I can't always go back and rewrite what I've worked on, it's really good to know while I plan future chapters and stories! That being said, I definitely can't say I'm going anywhere too original with the plot (though I really agree with your taste in TV shows and movies every time you give examples, haha)…not going to say too much more than that, as I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but your suspicions are pretty fair, and we're probably not going to get into any _huge_ plot twists. But business is definitely going to get messy for Jack, and a few more snippets of info (and worldbuilding) sneak into every chapter, so we're getting somewhere. Slowly. :-)

Guest: Thanks! I'm always worried about OCs – to be honest, I don't always like them much – but it's awesome to know that Maggie came across okay!

I've never had reviewers so involved in a story or give such amazing feedback, so thanks to everyone who commented, followed, or favorited this story! If you have a second, please leave a quick review to let me know what you liked/disliked, what questions you have, what worked or didn't – it means a lot.

'Till next time, happy reading!

ket


	6. Continue Playing? - Yes or No

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**Six – Continue? - Yes / No**

**.**

Jack's not the type of person to overreact to surprises. Three years of flying with smugglers, including all of the mutinies, changing plans, and sudden ambushes that go along with that, have tempered the pilot into a pretty adaptable and easygoing pro.

Still, when he finally drags himself out of his room at SIT 09:48 and returns to the cockpit, the sight of all four of his crewmates cramping the space inside is almost enough to make him scream. He shoots a dirty look at Sandy, who shrugs it off with a smile from his position in the pilot's seat.

"Ah! Jack!" North cries, pulling his eyes from the windshield display, in which a black hole looms a little too far into the wide safety buffer Jack normally gives a ship. "We were just going to wake you." Wordlessly, the pilot reaches past the captain to adjust their position. Sandy hops from his seat and gives a winning, dramatic little bow.

"Thanks for watching it, Sandy," Jack says amusedly, disabling the autopilot and dropping into his seat as he wonders why it's hard to stay angry with the little inventor. A slow beeping sound attracts his attention to the Nav Board. "Is that…?"

"That's why we were going to wake you up," Tooth responds from over his shoulder, following his line of vision. "It started up a few minutes ago, but we weren't sure what it meant."

"Lucky it's not the sound for the self-destruct countdown," Jack replies sarcastically, swiping his finger over the screen to bring up the details.

"This ship has a self-destruct program?" Tooth asks, alarmed.

"No. No, it doesn't," Jack replies wearily, ignoring Bunny's glare in favor of reading the Nav Board's latest scan of their surroundings. A vast, blinking circle envelops the approaching BL-413, and Jack knows its purpose before he even sees the readout. Swearing, he grabs the thrusters, hands flickering across the console to stop the_ Guardian _in place. The ship's artificial gravity system kicks in to ensure that they feel none of the inertia involved, and they halt in position some distance away from the flashing border.

"What is it?" Bunny asks warily, frowning at Jack's expression. "It's some kinda barrier or shield, is it?"

"It's a Rampart Shield. A no-fly zone," Jack adds wryly. "If we cross over it, it'll be considered an act of aggression, and we could be shot down. I hear they used to use them all the time in the Lunar Wars, but nowadays you don't see them anymore. Not on civilized planets, anyway."

"You told us there was nothing _on _the planet to protect."

"There isn't. Not as far as I know. I mean, unless one of the tiny mining villages has decided it's got something too valuable to share," he adds doubtfully. "But they wouldn't have the tech for something like this, and it'd be annoying to pull the Rampart Shield up and down every time they want to trade their minerals."

"But most shields are automatic, aren't they?" Tooth argues. "They're designed to be durable, to function even in the most adverse conditions. It's entirely possible for the Rampart Shield to remain intact even once the planet has been evacuated."

This settles Jack's nerves. "I guess so," he admits tentatively. "We _could _request permission to cross into it. If there's no one there to maintain it, we won't get a response, and we can just roll on through. But if we request permission and there _are _people there looking after it…"

"Then we've just alerted them to our position. And if they're involved in the theft, they'll know what we're after," Bunny retorts.

"But how likely is it that there _are _people there? Isn't it more likely that someone who's stolen the prototype is hiding out in the farthest place they can on the planet, somewhere almost uninhabitable?" Tooth asks.

"We do not know who has stolen from us," North says, arms akimbo as he leans over to peer at the shield's vast diameter on the Nav Board. "It would be best to tell no one what we seek."

Jack hesitates. "I could always…just cloak us?" he ventures.

"Cloak?" Bunny parrots. "What do ya mean? Optical camouflage technology for moving vehicles is still a long way off, mate—and it's nothing we've got on board."

"Not _physically,_" Jack explains. "You're thinking of light-bending tech. What _I _mean is that anyone right next to us would still see us, and if they've got any other kinds of surveillance, it'll pick it up as we get close to the planet. But with this kind of defense, I can basically redirect the search filters they're sending out to make it look like we have no gravitational pull. We won't show up on their scans."

"I did not think to equip the_ Guardian _with such technology," North admits.

"Any ship can do it if you know how. It just takes a few minutes."

"I have not heard of this."

"It may not be exactly legal, per se," Jack allows, smiling.

To his surprise, Bunny smiles back. "I guess that's why we brought you on board, mate," the Pooka replies, thumping a giant paw onto Jack's shoulder and collapsing into the navigator's seat to lean over the console. "Show us how, then."

Hesitantly at first, Jack pulls up the onboard computer display across the windscreen, fingers leaping through the settings under the inventors' inquisitive gazes. They give him a few minutes of silence as he works, but he can feel the weight of their curiosity. Once Jack has managed to reformat the ship's output and alter the incoming gravitational sensors, he turns back to them, one eyebrow raised.

"Could come in handy sometime," Bunny allows, smirking.

"Let's see if it has worked," North orders.

The pilot swivels his chair back around to take control of the ship once more. They dance slowly at the outer edge of the Rampart Shield, which is invisible to their eyes but flashes red on the Nav Board map. Jack maneuvers them across and toward the outer range of BL-413's gravitational pull.

"So far, so good," Jack mutters under his breath, though he can't help but feel a little on edge.

The others say nothing, likely as tense as Jack is. The pilot steers them closer to the planet, whose grey-brown surface is striated by deep cracks and the trenches of rocky ridges that wander as aimlessly as leaf miner lines across foliage. Nearly half of it is layered in sheets of thick, white ice, and some of it is obscured by spinning swirls of cloud. In the dim glow of its dying orange star, the planet looks almost beautiful.

Jack has never seen BL-413 from above before. When he'd first been brought here three years ago, he was hardly in a position to look out of a window of the massive ship. That had been back when the Collectors—who had by then turned out to be a militant group of researchers in crisply-pressed black uniforms—were still been pretending to be kind. Jack and the hundred or so others gathered from across the cosmos were politely confined to the barracks, "for your own safety."

Months later, when Jack stole a shuttle to make his escape, he hadn't exactly turned around to stare at the view.

At this point, the_ Guardian _is near enough to be picked up by other surveillance systems, if the planet has any. Jack's not surprised it doesn't; something in the cold, scarred surface makes BL-413 look desolate and uninhabited.

"Looks like the shield must have just been the remnants of an alarm system," Tooth murmurs as Jack begins the customary scan of the planet's surface and atmosphere.

"Hell, if I were stranded out here on this planet, I'd hand back the prototype in a heartbeat and thank us for the rescue," Bunny gripes.

"I'm gonna bring us all the way into low orbit. Best to buckle in, just in case of turbulence," the pilot mutters, and the others obey, sliding makeshift seats from the wall panels. Bunny buckles into the navigator's seat at his side. Jack's eyes flicker over the scan's results: BL-413 has an immense cryosphere, a dense silicate crust, and a fairly breathable atmosphere rich in the heavier gases, with plenty of carbon dioxide, oxygen, nitrogen, and argon. Considering its orbit around such a small star, the world has likely undergone planetary engineering to make it habitable. Jack wonders whether the IGC did that in its early years, or whether it was done illegally by someone else.

The_ Guardian _breaches the troposphere, rolls of thick grey clouds obscuring the view from the windscreen. Gravitational sensors work for distant objects, but now that they're nearer to the planet, Jack flicks the starship's infrared sensors onto the main display. A small patch of bright red and orange flourishes in the cool blues of their surroundings, a strange anomaly on an infrared scan of the ice planet. It's impossible—so Jack stretches out his own personal sensors to confirm that several connected hubs of warm air wait for them just in the distance.

The pilot's stomach shoots into his throat. "Guys," he manages, "this isn't right. I don't think we're alone here." He leans forward to check the other scans for machinery when they reach the base of the weather front and the clouds suddenly clear. Spilling across the snow-covered mountainside is a dingy grey trail of buildings dug out of the glacial ground, most of them still partially covered in the ice Jack left on top of them three years ago. "Holy shit."

"I thought you said there was no way anyone was here?" The Pooka's voice is accusatory.

"I—there _was_ _nothing _here last time I was here, but that was years ago, okay?"

Tooth leans forward as much as she can while still buckled into the wall seat. "Wait a second. Do you see the logo on the side of the building? The one that looks a little like a horse?"

"Black Industries?" North asks curiously, craning his neck to see as well.

"Time to get out of here," Jack declares, pausing their descent.

"Wait—this does not make sense," North continues. "They have facilities on SCORPio, and state-of-the-art, I am told. Why would he need a secret—"

"Are you _really _saying you can't see Pitch Black ordering someone to steal an invention from us?" Bunny interrupts dryly. "That bludger would do anything to make a name for his company, including stealing our goods. He's been plastered in the tabloids for years for stealing ideas without credit—and hell, he was fined for bribing hospital officials to buy his shonky drugs last year!"

By the time Jack can tear his eyes away from the ground long enough to turn the ship back, he finally has the chance to read the new scans. "Damn it," he swears, and before any of them can ask why, a pair of gleaming Orba-58 ships pass before the windshield. Though not so large as the hulking Collector ships, which the ship's scan notes are stationed in the crevice just beyond the mountain, the Orbas are twice the size of the_ Guardian, _and their bulky metal sides and jutting lasers speak to their warship origins.

"Fan-_bloody_-tastic," Bunny grumbles as the console chirps to notify them that the Orbas are doing a full scan of the ship. "Pitch is going to report us for this. Can you imagine the negative press?"

Jack snorts, half at Bunny's words and half because he can't believe how noticeably the ships are prepping their lasers. "I don't think it's that kinda facility," he grinds out. "Hold on to something."

Before any of them can respond, Jack throws the thrusters into gear, taking advantage of the_ Guardian_'s small size and speed and its ability to maneuver past the ships before they even have a second to turn around. Going straight up will mean fighting gravity too harshly, and it will tax their engines more than they can stand, but Jack sets the upward angle as steep as he thinks the ship will allow.

"What are you doing, Jack?" Tooth cries. "We can't just _leave—_" A shudder rocks the _Guardian, _and Tooth stops mid-sentence. "What—is that turbulence?"

"They're _firing _at us," Jack says. "Pitch didn't make a secret freaking facility out in the middle of nowhere to experiment with hybrid flowers! Did you really think they were gonna pat us on the head and let us go after we came across a place like this?"

"But why—he wouldn't—" she protests, just as another jolt shakes them, this time provoking the console to warn Jack of the damages.

The pilot swears again and points the_ Guardian _back down toward the planet's surface before he has the chance to change his mind.

"What are you doing?" North asks worriedly.

"We're faster than they are, but that doesn't mean much when we're running from them out in the open. If we don't find a way to lose them, they'll blast us to pieces before we can even get out of orbit. They're too big to get through some of those trenches easily, so we'll have to give that a shot."

They drop below the mountain peaks and into the rough crevices below, and the thin light penetrating the cloud layer dims. At Jack's right, Bunny grips the arms of his chairs tightly, and the pilot remembers that the Pooka hates this kind of evasive flight. To his surprise, Bunny's voice is steady when he speaks next. "We've got some decent firepower on this ship. Think you can find a way to double back down here and catch 'em by surprise?"

Jack frowns, weaving past a jutting boulder. The rearview image that pops up at the bottom of the windshield shows that the Orbas are having a hard time keeping up, and the protruding rocks give the_ Guardian _pretty decent cover. "I won't be able to fire the lasers and fly through such tight spaces at the same time. It's hard enough to keep us steady as we are."

"No worries, mate," the Pooka responds, leaning toward the console. To the pilot's surprise, he presses a few buttons to bring arms control to the navigator's side. "I don't just program games, you know," he adds, and only the nervous thump of his heel against the floor betrays his unease.

In spite of the anxiety darting through his veins, Jack ventures a grin. In his experience, the best way to handle this kind of situation is to distract both of them from the danger. _Make it a game, _he thinks_. _"Those are fighting words! Let's see what you've got. I'll find a way to turn us around."

The canyon walls dart past at incredible speeds, but the_ Guardian's _slim frame makes it easy for Jack to weave past every outcropping. The Orbas, though just compact enough to enter the trenches, cannot maneuver as quickly or with as much agility. One abandons the effort entirely to follow the_ Guardian _from above, but Jack's speed makes it too difficult to follow easily, and the wall of the winding crevice provides too much shelter from an aboveground attack.

At last, they come to a bend in the narrow canyon where the gap between walls widens. "Get ready, Mr. Gaming Champ," Jack warns Bunny. "Your test starts in three…two…"

He pivots the spacecraft in one swift movement to face their pursuer and barely has time to take in the dark streaks in the Orba's hull—_their _pilot has obviously been having a hard time keeping them from scraping the walls—before Bunny fires. The_ Guardian'_s laser blasts the enemy ship, and though its light artillery would usually not be expected to cause any serious injury, Bunny has managed to do some superficial damage. Better still, while the Orba class ships are built for warfare, the precision lasers on the_ Guardian _have allowed Bunny to target their enemy's vulnerable rear rotors. It won't hold them off for long, but the precision shot will ensure that they take a few minutes for hasty repairs.

"Hah! See that, mate?"

"You did that on purpose?" Jack asks, grinning. "Fine, two out of ten points for the shot." He ignores Bunny's indignant splutters and flies their ship up and over the damaged Orba before it can recover. The scans show the other Orba to be just above them, atop the rock wall. The pilot urges the_ Guardian _onward. "Alright, here comes level two," he says. "Open air combat. Ready?"

"I'll bloody show ya," the Pooka grumbles. They spill over the lip of the canyon wall and into the dying sunlight where the first Orba is waiting, its lasers prepped in their direction. Jack's throat goes dry, but Bunny is already firing in rapid strokes, targeting each of the ship's critical systems. Jack keeps them moving just in case, but as the black smoke clears, the ship appears to be in no condition to follow them anytime soon.

"Full ten points," Jack replies hoarsely in response to Bunny's smug look. The pilot grins. "And look at that, you get the quick draw bonus too."

The Orba sags to the ground like a ragged kite drifting out of the breeze. North rolls out a triumphant laugh. "This will teach them to meddle with a first-class pilot and Pooka warrior!" Jack turns to see Sandy throwing out tiny, celebratory fireworks above his head.

He sweeps the_ Guardian _back toward the crevice as he scans the ship's readout, intending to have Bunny make sure their first enemy is truly out of commission, but the foreign ship isn't where they left it. Jack barely has time to throw the thrusters back into full gear before a blast rocksthe_ Guardian, _echoing deep throughout the inside of her hull. The first damaged Orba is still pursuing them, but it's recovered faster than Jack would have believed—and the rearview image shows that it's right at their backs. The ship looms between _The Guardian _and the crevice, meaning that there's no quick option to hide this time.

Jack swears. "Freaking boss battles," he groans, already taking energy from their damaged thruster to pour into the rest of the systems as the_ Guardian_ jets away.

"Can you turn her around?" Bunny asks as alert boxes pop up on screen, warning them of the damages. "I'll get in another one."

"You'll probably only get one shot," Jack warns, already dampening the thrusters to pivot the ship as fast as possible. "Make it count."

The Orba is more prepared for this second, identical attack, and a blast cracks across the side of the ship before they can even spin to face their pursuers. Jack swipes the onscreen alert boxes, now nearly overpowering, into a corner at the bottom of the windscreen so Bunny can see; the Pooka attacks almost before the pilot can finish, two quick, booming pulses that hit the edge of the foreign ship's thrusters.

"Damn," he swears as the Guardian rumbles past the sinking underbelly of the Orba. "Just missed the side rotor."

"It'll buy us time," Jack counters. "But—"

"Let us use the time to find a place to recover," North says from over their shoulders. "Can you use the cloak you used earlier? We may need repairs very soon. We will need an excellent hiding place."

"Then keep your eyes peeled for one," Jack replies, pouring their remaining power into the undamaged rear thrusters. Once the Orba falls out of sight on the rear view screen, the pilot changes direction and quickly resets their cloak from earlier. They dart low across the planet's icy surface, all eyes scanning the crevices below.

Several minutes pass in tense silence as they fly, the red alerts on the screen growing as their remaining power dwindles. "Look, there!" Tooth cries suddenly. It takes Jack a minute to see what she does, a rocky outcropping that projects over a small, dark alcove at the foot of one of the crevices. He changes the_ Guardian_'s direction instantly, diving into the trench as the stone walls rise above them on either side. The overhang is low enough to conceal them, but it's not so low that the ship won't fit beneath, and Jack guides them far enough into the niche to be certain the Orbas won't find them. It's just in time, too:the_ Guardian _shudders as though taking a final breath and begins to power down, the strain of the last few minutes too taxing for the engine. For good measure, Jack powers down some of the internal systems as well to conserve their remaining energy, keeping the gravitational cloak running as he halts the nonessentials. Before he shuts off the console, he glances once more at the radar, where the Orbas circle in the distance like hungry vultures.

"Well, that was fun," he remarks, swiveling in his seat to face the others. The cockpit is dark now, lit only by what little natural light can reach them under the outcropping and by Sandy's subtle glow.

"What do we do now?" Tooth whispers as though expecting another attack at any moment.

In one fluid movement, North stands and unbuckles his seatbelt. "What are the damages? Can the ship fly still?"

"Maybe for short flights," Jack replies. "They took out one of the rear thrusters—no leaving the atmosphere without that…" he turns back to the console to temporarily boot up the internal scanners. "Not even a short flight," he amends after a moment. That last run overheated our reactor. It's a quick fix if we can find a new one, but…we'll need replacement parts."

"Oh, well, let's just head to the bloody convenience store then," Bunny says. "Where the hell are we going to come up with replacement parts in the middle of nowhere on this godforsaken rock?"

As Jack ducks beneath the console to grab his worn shoes, Sandy pats the Pooka's furred back and lets out a few symbols Jack assumes are meant to be reassuring. "We'll have to go on foot," the pilot responds grimly, lacing up his boots.

"How is that any better than flying?"

"It's not much," Jack admits, "but like I said before, there are mining villages on the planet. This isn't an isolated system—certain trade ships are regularly allowed in and out, since they can't grow enough food to keep themselves fed on their own in this climate—and even though they probably won't have parts that fit the ship as well as the originals did, the standard sizes will work in a pinch."

"Wait, wait—_what _villages? We didn't see anything flying over here."

"And you wouldn't. If youlived on the same planet as Pitch, how much attention would _you _want to draw to yourself? But they're out there if you know where to look."

"And how do you know where to look, then?" Bunny asks, though without bite. "This doesn't seem like the planet for your bushrangers—nothing here to speak of. Unless those miners are finding precious gems down there," he adds doubtfully.

"Not that I know of. Mostly it's titanium and its alloys, I've been told." He stands, hesitating. "Which are precious enough, anyway, if you know the right buyer."

Bunny grunts as Sandy looks between them. Into the air streams a thin, golden triangle that stretches out like a pennant, followed by a question mark.

"We must continue, Sandy—there is no other option," North booms, his voice decisive as he pulls himself to his feet and heads to the corridor. "And I may be mistaken, but I believe this is the kind of trip where weapons would be nice. Just in case."

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**A/N: **Apologies for the delay in this chapter – life has been really hectic for the past few weeks, and I haven't had much time to write. I'm also tinkering with the structure of the next few chapters a little…so while I'm trying to keep to my self-proclaimed, every-other-weekend updating schedule, the next chapter might be a bit delayed as well. Still, we're finally starting to get somewhere, though it's not quite somewhere Jack wants to be :-)

Thanks to my guest reviewers!

**reader22681**: Thank you so much - it's really flattering to hear :-) And yes, Sandy is definitely the den mother of the Guardians in this fic, especially given that I don't imagine Jack taking such direct orders from anyone else, to be honest! Plus, Sandy has the innate ability to tell when people are short on sleep, haha.

**Guest**: Thanks! Here's more!

**C1nd3r5**: Good to hear from you – and I'm glad you liked the chapter :-)

**GuestTGS**: Thanks again for the feedback! And you're right; I definitely had to do some research before working on the last chapter (though it appears that from a scientific standpoint, Guardians of the Galaxy did pretty much get it right)…but space research is the fun kind of research :-)

Thanks so much to everyone who's reviewed—you guys are amazing, and all of the feedback, encouragement, and constructive criticism is extremely helpful! Please consider leaving a review to let me know what you thought of this chapter as well.

If you're in the States, Happy Fourth, and if you're anywhere else, have a brilliant weekend!

'Till next time,

ket


	7. The Argument for Diplomacy

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**Seven – The Argument for Diplomacy**

**.**

It's not that Jack's _afraid _of weapons, exactly—they just make him antsy. Theoretically, of course, as long as he manages to control his powers and remain within an arm's reach, he can freeze anyone who points a laser or knife at him before there's a chance to attack. But that doesn't mean he's not keenly aware of the presence of heavy arms, and his wariness has saved him more than once during his travels.

"Sure ya don't want a boomerang? Got plenty."

"No, thanks," Jack replies cagily as they take their first steps away from the_ Guardian _and into the thin, frozen atmosphere of BL-413. He watches Tooth strap a sword to her side. "I wouldn't know how to use one anyway."

Without another word, the pilot leads them beneath the underbelly of the ship and toward the open crevice, which rises into a steep, rocky wall fifty feet away. The mining community here tends to keep to its underground system of tunnels and out of reach of Pitch's machinations, but Jack is certain that he saw one of their telltale route markers a little ways back while they were looking for a hideout for the ship. It didn't seem so far when they were in the air, but now that they must travel on foot, it may take them an hour or more to reach it. What's more, the path is icy and rock-strewn—though that may be helpful in the long run, as there are multitudes of hiding places should the Orbas return.

A tug at the hem of his jacket draws his attention. Sandy points at Jack, wraps his arms around himself, and shudders dramatically.

"Oh, that?" Jack begins, looking behind him, where Tooth is returning from the lowered ramp of the ship, having run back to find a thick blue coat with openings that lace around her wings. North is similarly bundled up, with a furred cloak to match his jubilant red attire. Bunny has his natural padding to warm him, Jack supposes, and Sandy is—well, sand. "I'm fine," the pilot laughs, looking down at his thin leather jacket. "I grew up on a planet like this. Cold is no big deal to me."

Sandy looks at him doubtfully as something heavy presses into Jack's side. "Here," Bunny says gruffly. "Everyone knows how to fire a gun."

"That's—" Jack fumbles to hold the laser. "Uh, I don't think that's a great idea. Besides, you'll need more than just boomerangs, won't you?"

The Pooka slips one of the weapons from its holster and holds it out to Jack, who takes it gingerly. It's made of hard wood, with strange, winding carvings the pilot assumes mean something to Bunny, and the tips are sharp and metallic. Jack looks up at the Pooka in question.

"That one's a special order. Tipped in edges that shear off on their own. Self-sharpening," he clarifies with a wolfish grin, and Jack is suddenly happy he doesn't have to fight the overgrown rabbit himself.

"Great," the pilot replies, handing the boomerang back to awkwardly strap the laser's holster to his side. He doesn't mention that he's pretty certain he's deadly enough by accident on his own, or that he's _completely_ certain he'll never draw the gun.

"Let us keep an ear out for Orba engines," North warns, effectively sobering the mood as they all glance into the air automatically.

Jack stretches out his thermal senses, but he can feel nothing out of the ordinary on this icy rock: everything within walking distance is frozen and cold, so it's difficult to differentiate one thing from another. Still, the pilot doesn't sense anything that feels like the warmth of a large ship's exterior nearby, so he assumes they're safe for now. "Ready to go?"

Hand still resting warily on the butt of the laser gun at his side, North gestures for him to lead the way.

As soon as they step out from the shelter of the alcove, the wind whips across the open gorge, stinging Jack's eyes and biting at his skin. Its roar is so loud that they wouldn't hear the sounds of an approaching Orba until it was upon them, though Jack's ability to sense the ships' heat should make that irrelevant. He's unreasonably grateful for his powers right now, especially considering the blanket of pale blue ice that covers the walls and ground. His boots should have no traction at all on such surfaces, but somehow, he finds himself clambering nimbly over each boulder with sure footing.

The same can't be said of all of them. Tooth, of course, takes to the air, wings fluttering against the bitter wind, and Sandy hovers a few inches above the ground to negate a need for walking. North and Bunny, however, slip and scramble across the icy surface. North keeps his composure, looking almost amused as he wobbles precariously across the surface, but Bunny grumbles under his breath, teeth chattering and—as Jack has the opportunity to see when the Pooka falls to the ground again—tail twitching.

Worried as he is, the pilot has to turn away to hide a grin.

As they make painfully slow progress through the trench, Jack keeps his eyes peeled for the doorway he'd seen earlier, an odd, wide bulge in the rocky ground. They are already so close that he can sense the comparative warmth of the village that lies below their feet. When thinks he's finally spotted the feature in the distance, he keeps it to himself until he's certain, but there's really no mistaking it. Where the rest of the ground is jagged and rocky, the mound in the distance is unnaturally shaped, with smooth curves to the rock as though the makers tried to emulate the natural appearance of the ice but couldn't quite manage it. "Almost there," he shouts over the howling wind.

"About time," Bunny shouts back gruffly, though his precarious teetering dampens the menace in his voice.

Jack clambers onto the stone. Though the door is meant to be hidden, Jack knows what to look for: a curved seam that draws a rough circle into the rock. He steps nearer, eager to be out of the whipping wind, and then he stops short, frowning. "Um," he says.

"Um?" North parrots.

"Usually it just opens," Jack responds sheepishly. "Motion sensors, I guess. Or maybe weight. I dunno."

"So…you're saying you can't get us in?" Bunny replies.

"No—maybe. I'm saying it's not working like I thought it would." He frowns, bending down to follow the faint line in the rock as though that will make the mechanism reveal its secrets, eyes narrowed against the wind. He searches his mind for anything he might have done to trigger an opening the first and only time he had stumbled across one of the village doors, but he'd been in such a state of panic that he can't recall doing anything in particular. "I guess they just upgraded their security system," he realizes slowly. It's the only thing that makes sense, especially since the last time Jack was here, he'd been in such a desperate rush to escape Pitch that he'd stolen one of the village's few shuttles to get away.

His train of thought is broken when he steps on something that sinks beneath his feet. He stumbles backward as the ground whirrs and a small bit of rock slides away to reveal a black panel with strange symbols floating across the screen. Something nudges his side gently. Sandy guides Jack safely across the border of the doorway, then turns back to the rocky bulge.

"What are you doing?" Jack asks curiously as the man bends over the screen, swiping his fingers back and forth to select and discard various strings of foreign characters.

Without looking up, the developer lets fly a few symbols that pass too quickly for Jack to understand. The pilot turns to Tooth helplessly, and the fairy smiles. "This is kind of Sandy's thing," she says by way of explanation. "He can bypass the system."

Jack watches the series of quick, certain movements, but he hardly has time to study them in any detail before the wide door begins to slide open like an aperture. In blind wonder, Jack considers what it means that Sandy knows programming better than the other developers, who are already considered geniuses in their field. "Teach me everything you know," the pilot says seriously.

Sandy nods, grinning, before he pats the pilot patronizingly on the back and lets loose a symbol Jack understands clearly: a grasshopper. The pilot laughs and turns to the door. The sun is setting now, taking its faint light with it, but there is an odd glow coming from within to brighten the metal stairwell leading into the planet's depths.

Armed to the teeth as they are, the others don't hesitate to cross the threshold into the tunnel below; North leads them with a carefree step. Only Jack waits behind, staring stupidly for a moment as he quashes one of his ceaseless, inexplicable worries.

"Here goes," he mutters under his breath. His boots clank softly against the steel steps, echoing off the walls of the narrow tunnel. The noise reminds Jack that the last time he was here, he'd run barefoot from Pitch, and a silent entrance had been essential. He shudders and follows Sandy, who casts a faint golden glow on the stone walls.

The stairs, which are a bit too narrow for them to walk side by side, seem to go on forever. None of them is willing to break the silence, and in the minutes spent climbing, Jack has the time to wonder why in all the cosmos he's still here. Besides the fact that he's _stranded _here with them, of course. But now that _here _is a place that definitely contains Pitch just as he was three years ago, it's a place Jack is much less inclined to hang out for long. It's one thing to think Pitch is badly wounded and suffering from the destruction of all of his underhanded work, and it's another thing entirely to find that he's been continuing his operations all this time—even while sending out bounty hunters to seek Jack.

The pilot is definitely going to have to convince these guys to leave, and, barring that, he'll have to find a way off-world for himself: this isn't his problem, and he hasn't spent three years darting and dodging like a ghost to get caught in some idiotic plot on Pitch's home territory.

His thoughts trail off abruptly as he notices a quickening to the others' pace; just below them is a brightly lit opening, and they spill out of the stairwell at last to find themselves in a wide, open cavern.

In fact, Jack wouldn't have thought _cavern_ except that it can't possibly be anything else; they are at least a mile underground, perhaps more, so there's no reason that the area should appear so much like the world outside. Except that it does. It's as though they've stepped into the space inside a snow globe, a pristine little village full of squat, narrow houses that slope gently away from them, though it's not the sort of village Jack knows. There are no trees or foliage at all, not even grass, as far as he can see, only smoothly hewn stone the color of ash. The houses are too orderly, all of them packed neatly into regimented rows that stretch down toward the village center. Above them, a domed roof glows with some strange, blue light.

_That _wasn't happening last time Jack was here. It must have been the planet's night cycle, because it had been all too easy to slip in and out unnoticed. Now, though, there are _people _around—or at least one person, a little boy with a shock of red hair so bright he looks as though he might have caught fire. He's a tiny thing, even as far as children go—not that Jack's had much experience with kids these past few years, so what does he know—and he stares at them as though they've appeared out of thin air instead of descending the stairs.

It takes a few beats for the others to notice him, and it's only when the boy moves to plaster himself against the slate-grey wall of the house as though he can blend into it that they turn to him at all.

North, their apparent leader and ambassador, is the first to make a move. "Hello! Do you—"

The words have just barely left his mouth when the boy jumps like a spring frog, diving into the front door and slamming it shut before any of them has time to react.

"Maybe we'd better find someone else," Tooth murmurs after a beat. The air down here, though stagnant and insulated with motes of dust, is only marginally warmer than it is outside, and her arms are wrapped tightly around her chest in spite of her coat.

They hover uncertainly, Bunny standing up on his haunches to peer into the darkened window, before they follow the narrow road. It takes Jack a while to figure out what about this place sets him on edge. He peers down at the dark cobblestone as they walk, its even spacings and patterns, and he realizes that's just it: this city is too _neatly done. _Too unnatural. Nowhere is the haphazard sprawl of his village on FS-12, built in pieces with additional roads and buildings constructed with need like a river changing course by nature. Nowhere is the overgrown vegetation, the vines swallowing the side of a barn or the grass creeping into the road. Nowhere is vegetation at all, for that matter.

This city is _too _planned. Well-maintained, it might have been beautiful, but there are shutters drooping from their hinges, dirt-strewn windowpanes, missing roof tiles. If it weren't for the boy, Jack might have believed the city to be abandoned. He cringes at the muddy stone and tile, the identical darkened windows that burn at his back as though the houses are watching.

This, he realizes with a sudden start, is pretty much the case: from within some of the houses are shaded movements, the quick, defensive hovering of frightened animals.

"Uh…North?" he begins, twisting his head to see whether the movement behind the window is some trick of the light or the result of human action, but North is moving quickly toward the village center.

"Hello!" the captain cries, and Jack turns quickly to see that he is addressing a villager, a squat little woman who is certainly no taller than the boy they left behind them. Her fiery hair is clamped into two braids that hang to her waist, and she holds a wooden bucket in the crook of one arm. As Jack hurries forward to catch up with the others, she shrieks and scurries down a narrow alleyway between the houses. Bunny moves to chase after her, but he holds himself back when Tooth touches his arm gently.

"Better not to scare them, maybe," she says. "I guess they wouldn't see many strangers in a village like this."

Jack smiles at the flabbergasted expression on North's face, the slight disgruntlement with which he crosses his arms across the chest of his furred robes. _It's the clothes, too,_ Jack realizes suddenly, though hesitates to say as much. _I doubt they've seen clothes like this in their entire lives if they've lived planetside. _With his worn leather jacket over his hoodie and with his heavy-duty brown pants and boots, Jack imagines that he'd fit in fine around here. The others, though, shine—some of them literally—in their well-tailored, otherworldly garments.

"Maybe we can get someone out of one of the houses," he says instead. "I don't think we're out here alone."

"No," Bunny says with an approving nod. "We've had some watchers, haven't we?"

In the end, Tooth is voted to make the house call: Bunny and North are immediately vetoed for their large, intimidating statures, Jack proclaims himself "way too quiet" for the task, and Sandy would need his own translation services. Not that it matters. After rapping on a few doors, Tooth throws her hands into the air.

"This is ridiculous. How do we show them we just need help?"

"We need to track down their leader, or someone who can take us to some sort of government," Bunny replies.

"Good idea," North replies. "But where?"

Sandy flashes a few quick signs, but Jack can only catch a strange-looking hat, a fluttering sort of book, and a spiraled shape Jack now knows to mean _center._

The center of the city is perhaps their best bet. Wordlessly, they troop on through the stark, artificial light and the shifting dust. Farther off in the industrial gloom, a bright statue slowly makes itself known, its head and shoulders creeping over the rooftops until Jack can see its upper body in full.

_It must have been really pretty at one point, _he thinks to himself, staring at the drape of its robes, its white, pupil-less eyes. Years—centuries, maybe—of smog from the mines have cloaked it in odd patterns of dark grime.

Jack stares for so long that he trips and nearly falls onto his face; Bunny catches his elbow at the last minute. "Watch it mate," the Pooka cautions, pulling Jack to his feet.

"What did I…?" the pilot begins, staring down at the cobblestone. _IGC_, the cardboard box says. Clumped into the corner of homes are empty foodstuff wrappers, goods from the IGC.

"Guess it's from their rations?" Tooth asks, kicking some of the paper aside as they near the base of the statue.

"Doubt it," Jack replies, more sharply than he means to. He softens his voice. "If _you _were performing illegal…_whatever, _would _you _let a village on the planet have access to legit IGC traders?"

"So it's…?"

"Contraband," Jack says shortly. "I bet only smugglers come here. The kinds of people who keep their mouths shut."

The pilot catches part of Sandy's next statement. _Sad, _he says, a twisted shape like the arc of a hunting bow.

"I don't get it," Tooth says quietly, looking out across the littered street. "There's no reason for them to live like this—why don't they just…?"

"Exactly," Jack says tiredly. "Move? And leave behind the only home they have? Fight Pitch? With all of his financial backing? What are they supposed to do?"

"I don't know," she replies uncertainly. "I don't—"

A movement from farther off. Bunny is running almost before Jack can register it, a grey-brown blur that disappears between the houses.

"Bunny!" North cries, and they give chase through the dingy alleyway, overstepping scattered trash and leaping over bins and rubble. The city seems to create itself at his feet, coming into view just quickly enough for Jack to react to curves in the cobblestone path, to fallen banisters across the way. They reach the Pooka all at once, nearly crashing into his furred back as they make a sharp turn into an alleyway.

"Lost 'im," Bunny explains irritably, crossing his arms over his chest.

North runs a weary hand across his face. "All we are needing is a bit of help. If we can only _explain…_how else to get off of this rock?"

The thought of becoming trapped on this planet makes Jack's skin crawl, and an idea that has been niggling at the back of his mind for the last several minutes presents itself in full. He fidgets uncertainly, digging his heel into a groove between cobblestones. After a moment, Sandy hovers into view. _What, you, _and a puff of wispy cloud that Jack realizes might be _thought _or _think. _He files that away for later.

"Look," he begins, rolling his eyes up to the distant, artificial ceiling, "I know my, ah, _profession _isn't really your thing. But I'm thinking that we can go for a sort of…area of moral ambiguity."

"Explain," North says.

"Well…all of their spacecraft repair work is done in this kind of warehouse toward one edge of the village. So _may_be we can just…you know. Take one."

"We're not _stealing _one of their crafts, Jack," Tooth replies, looking as outraged as it is possible for someone of her disposition to appear.

"Note that I didn't say _steal. _I mean, we came here with good intentions, right? And it's kind of a shit situation. Drastic times, right? So we can just take one for now, and you can wire back payment later as soon as we have the chance to get out of here. And explain later."

Tooth sways uneasily, beating her wings a few times as she frowns in thought. "But…it's still stealing."

"For now," Jack allows. "But it's not like we have any other options. And _we _know we'll pay them back. And by 'we' I mean 'you,'" he adds, smiling cheekily.

"Is best option," North agrees after a few beats, thumping Jack on the shoulder nearly hard enough to make his knees buckle. "You know the area? Lead the way?"

_Know the area _is giving Jack way too much credit, of course. One quick run into the village three years ago when he was scared out of his mind hardly counts as a grand tour, and he has to retrace his steps several times before he feels they are heading the right way. As they approach the shipyard, the feeling of watching eyes grows stronger, though Jack couldn't say that he sees any particular movement in the windows anymore. Every now and again, though, a dark shape whips across an alley or between buildings just out of Jack's line of sight. The pilot glances pointedly at the Pooka—_did you see that?_—and Bunny nods each time without taking his eyes from their surroundings. Or his paw from the edge of his weapon.

As the building Jack thinks is shuttle yard approaches slowly, its dingy tin roof creeping slowly above the buildings, the quick movements grow more frequent, until at last, one is near enough for Bunny to again dash after it before the others realize what is happening.

They take off behind him, right on his heels and whipping between buildings and sheds until Jack hears something strange: before them is the sound of voices, strange to Jack's ears after the resounding, oppressive silence of the area behind them.

They spill out into a wide opening, the great grey statue looming over them, its bare feet covering a pedestal half the length of the_ Guardian. _As Jack coughs in the dusty air to regain his breath, he finally takes notice of the assembled villagers amassed in the square. They surround Bunny, but their short statures make it easy to see the Pooka regardless; they come up just above his tail. All of them have the same fiery red hair and the same short, stocky build of the villagers seen earlier. Their patchwork of grey and green and brown clothing, obviously animal skin no matter how well-tailored, is faded and slightly grimed, and they wear worn leather boots or no shoes at all.

The crowd turns to them in an explosion of noise, half of the villagers still crying out at Bunny, and Jack realizes for the first time that they are armed with pitchforks, wooden beams, and household knives, men and women alike. Given their short stature, it might have been almost adorable, except that there are so manyof them. _They're leprechauns, _he realizes suddenly. _Haven't seen one of those since…_Captain Nuada, with his slick red hair. He shudders.

"Look, mates," Bunny is saying, his paws turned outward in the universal sign of _we-come-in-peace. _"We don't mean—"

"How in the great green galaxy did you get in here?" one of them snarls. The accent is just as foreign as Jack remembers, something in the vowels, the way _in _shortens itself to _en. _The rest of the crowd mutters and fumes, and Tooth flurries over to Bunny's side, letting the crowd engulf her. The others follow behind just in case, though Jack's not fond of the heated air once they're surrounded, the way in which the mass of bodies presses in against him.

"Someone find Bres!" another cries. "Tell 'im the snatchers've come!"

"We are only looking for help," North booms over them, and they stutter into silence at the volume of his voice. "We are not here to hurt you."

"All we have on that is your word," someone argues, and the crowd parts a little so that Jack can see a stout little man with one hand on the butt of a laser. He steps forward, and when the crowd hushes this time, it is less in confusion and more out of confidence and surety. This man is their leader, Jack realizes, and they're waiting for his word. "Are you the ones that've been coming in the night?"

"We're only looking for spare ship parts," Tooth explains quickly, possibly so that Bunny, whose ears are drawn back in irritation, won't have the chance to speak. "That's all. We can pay."

"Who _are _you?" the man cries, suddenly outraged. Thick strands of braids swing from his red beard. "Done with our children, are you? You're not our traders, and we're not giving you anything of ours." At this, the others jump back into anger.

"You tell 'em, Bres," says a woman, thumping her leader hard on the back. Around her, the crowd mutters in agreement.

"We're not—wait. Your children?" North fumbles to catch his words.

"Yeah, our _children_. Half of 'em missing from their beds in the night."

"We would never harm a child," says North quietly. "And we have only just arrived. We have—"

Tooth pokes him hurriedly. "Don't tell them about Pitch," she whispers, just loud enough for Jack to make out over the restless, murmuring crowd. "Just in case they're allied with him."

"Our situation is dire," North finishes. "We are in desperate need of spare parts for our ship."

Bres looks at them suspiciously, his eyes darting back and forth between North and Tooth. "And again, all I've got is your word. I think it's best you left the way you came."

"In return for the spare parts, we'll look for your missing children," North says hurriedly. "We are having many ties to the IGC, and—"

The man, Bres, snaps over at the waist to spit onto the ground. "Bloody IGC. If they've done nothing about our children since we first asked 'em, what makes you think they'll do anything now?"

"They know your children are missing?" Bunny asks in surprise.

"They've known for years. The whole universe has known!" a man cries from somewhere at the back of the crowd.

"Hear, hear!"

"Our kids aren't _missing. _They're _taken, _like all the rest."

"IGC's done nothing for any of us. Looking the other way, they are! We're just people from a speck of dust off in the reaches. They don't care which dark rock someone's taken our babies off to."

"What do you mean?" Tooth asks slowly, shaking her head. "If the IGC knew about any of this, it'd be—well, it'd be news."

There is an incredulous pause, and Jack finds himself staring just as blankly as the villagers. _There's _no _way,_ he thinks, _no way they don't know about that. All of the people disappearing from planets in the Reaches, from HAB Sector planets. _But he forgot who he's dealing with. There would be no reason for such influential inventors, so submerged in research and innovative technological advances, to notice anything subtle until it smacks them in the face.

Jack covers his own face with both hands. _Cosmos,_ he realizes. _If Pitch is _alive_ and all of his facilities are back up, then the disappearances—all the people missing from across the galaxy—it's Pitch, isn't it? Pitch is the reason all those people are gone._

Bres snorts, loud and horse-like, drawing them all back to attention. "You're one of _them, _aren't you? Those snots from the HAB Sector planets, wrapped up in your own little penthouse worlds, never noticing anything under your own noses."

Jeers rain down on them from the crowd; some of them are stabbing their makeshift weapons into the air. Bunny snarls and raises himself up to full height. Jack claps a hand to his arm quickly, shaking his head. If this becomes a full-fledged brawl, the Guardians may end up doing things they regret—and with the sheer numbers of the leprechauns, they might not even be the victors.

"Look, you're right," the pilot tells Bres wearily. "People are being stolen, and not just here—all over the Reaches. There's something wrong, and we all know it, and it's hard to tell who to trust. But you gotta believe we're just trying to get off this rock as fast as possible. If we knew anything about the missing kids, we'd tell you."

The man stares at Jack for a very long time, his eyes dark and piercing. For several moments, the crowd is torn between glaring at them and bouncing uncertainly on their feet as though all they need is a word from their leader to be spurred into violence. Eventually, Bres nods sharply. "Maybe you are just passing through," he allows, "but we can't help you. We don't have the parts to spare, and even if we did, we can't trust you enough to loan them out to you. You're gonna need to get out of here now."

"Don't you have _anything—_"

"Listen, lady." Bres cuts Tooth off curtly, and his tone makes even Sandy bristle at the treatment. "If I was gonna help some off-worlders, I wouldn't do it for a bunch of ritzy snobs like you folk. We don't have the parts, so it isn't even up to me, but there you have it. Now, unless you want to be starting something, you'll leave the way you came and stop causing all this trouble."

He turns sharply on his heel without waiting for a response, as though they aren't worth his remaining attention, but a jerk of his head apparently signals something to the onlookers. While most of the crowd begins to begrudgingly disperse, a small team of five or so leprechauns—all of them stout and fat and of uncertain gender—stream forward to meet the Guardians. Like Bres, these leprechauns carry holstered weapons at their sides, not the hodge-podge of makeshift weapons the rest of the crowd was carrying.

"We'll escort you," says one of them, and Jack thinks there might be a womanish softness under the red hair that slips across her face.

There isn't much of a choice. The team presses them forward, and the Guardians, perhaps too shell-shocked at the way the plan has gone to say anything more, follow wordlessly. Jack bites his tongue as they trace their steps back through the dingy alleyways, refraining from asking the millions of questions he wants to know about Pitch. If he speaks now, he's afraid it'll become a deluge, something too hard to take back, and the last thing he needs is to draw suspicion to himself.

Especially now. In the oppressive silence, Jack finally has time to process all that has happened: Pitch isn't quite as permanently crippled as Jack would have wanted to believe, and _he's probably here. _And not only is he probably here, but he's apparently thriving, has apparently even dug out his facility and continued to process living bodies as though they were medical guinea pigs or livestock. And Jack, like complete and utter _fool, _has stepped right back onto his planet when the place he wants to be is thousands of light years away from it.

And not only has he _stepped _onto it; he's _stranded _on it. Hot fear courses through him, bubbling in the pit of his stomach until he's almost nauseous with it. He has to get out of here, he realizes, in whatever way he can. With or without the others, if it comes down to it. If they decide to press on regardless of his decision…well, he'll have to leave them behind.

Almost before he realizes it, they're climbing the stairwell. He only realizes it once he's halfway up the steps, gasping great breaths of air at the exertion. It takes them several minutes to reach the top and climb back out into the open air.

In the time it has taken them to descend and return, night has fallen across BL-413. A biting wind whips through the narrow crater around them, whistling past Jack's ears with such force that he feels momentarily deafened. The hike back to the ship is done in silence, all of them but Jack and Sandy huddled against the swiftly dropping temperatures.

"Cosmos," North bites out when they finally spill out into the shielded alcove and step under the belly of the_ Guardian. _"That is not what I expected."

"No repairs," Tooth says needlessly as Jack tugs at the entrance ramp, which needs a bit of manual help now that the nonessential power systems have been rerouted to the main grid. Bunny and North join him, and through their combined effort, it squeals down to the ground. The backup lights click on as they enter. "What do we do?"

"What _can_ we do?" North asks, frowning. He leads them down the walkway into the kitchen. "Call for help. It is last resort, yes, but I will see who is nearby to help. It may take several days, depending…"

"Then we'll just hide here until help comes?" Tooth asks incredulously.

"Unless you've got a better idea, it may be our best bet," Bunny retorts. He sinks into a seat across from Tooth at the kitchen table. "We've got enough food to last us, and as long as we route the power to life support systems—heat, light, you know—we'll be fine until then."

"Provided that Pitch doesn't find us," Jack adds, dropping into a seat to rest his chin on his folded arms.

"Yes, provided that," North agrees.

They're quiet for a few moments, letting the weight of the next few days settle across them, the coming chill and dwindling food supplies. The worry.

"I can't believe they didn't _help _us more," Tooth says suddenly, frowning as she stiffens in her chair. She looks almost offended. "Well, I know their children were missing," she adds, faltering for a moment. "But—it's not something _we _did. They acted like they knew we were guilty—didn't even give us the benefit of the doubt. What kind of a place does that?"

"A tiny village," Jack says. "I can't imagine they see many visitors they don't know. We obviously weren't here to trade, or we'd have contacted them about it in advance, and this planet isn't exactly a tourist destination. Of course they'd assume we'd be here for something…you know. More underhanded."

"A sad way to live," Tooth replies.

"Not really," Jack counters. "They look out for each other. They trust each other. It's just—different from being on a more populated planet. The mentality is different; everyone…bands together. Like a living's a joint effort. I don't think they meant anything by it. They're just defending themselves as well as they can."

Bunny cocks his head at him, ears twitching. "Sounds like you speak from experience," he says casually.

"Something like that," Jack agrees after a beat. The silence that follows is curious rather than oppressive, as though they'll allow him to fill it if he wants to but won't demand anything of him. "I grew up in a small place like this, remember? On a small planet out in the Reaches. The kind of place where outsiders don't really visit, and when they do, people watch them as…well, as novelties. Or as threats. It's just…a different kind of life."

Sandy pipes up then, using a swirl of symbols too quick for Jack to understand. When the pilot lingers too long, staring, Sandy shakes in a slight chuckle and simplifies with two waving, arrow-like signs Jack thinks he knows: _better _or _worse?_

In the time it takes him to work out the question and come to an answer, Tooth has stood to busy herself around the kitchen, rummaging through the set of pots and pans dangling from their place above the cabinets before turning to wait for Jack's response. In that moment, something in her solemn expression reminds him of Mags, and he doesn't want to talk about himself anymore.

"Neither," Jack replies, raising his eyebrows at Sandy to be sure he's understood the question. "Just different."

"Aw, c'mon, Frostbite," Bunny wheedles as Tooth sets the pan onto the stovetop and begins pulling ingredients for dinner down from the shelves: canned peppers, some sort of grain that looks vaguely like couscous, pluria oil, various spices. "You know enough about us, don't ya? Least you could do is distract us from the cold. Tell us about the shenanigans you got up to as a child. You look the type. And not many people make it off of a planet from the Reaches to the HAB."

It's said in a joking manner, but Jack feels that this is something he—they—genuinely want to know. Their curiosity over the past few weeks has been evident in their lingering stares, their questions: _So how does a boy from the Reaches become a pilot, anyway? _or _What led you to a life like this one, Jack?_

He doesn't want to answer. If things go according to plan, he'll be parting ways from them in the not-too-distant future, and he's still not sure how much of his story he trusts them with, friendly as they are. Still, Bunny and Sandy lean forward with an earnestness that's hard to ignore; North is more reserved, but he, too, follows Jack with his eyes, and Tooth's ear is cocked his way as though to catch whatever tidbits he might give. It'll be a long few days down here on the cold, darkening ship with nothing to distract them. If he doesn't tell them a bit of it now, they'll probably annoy him to his wit's end by the time he can finally leave.

It doesn't matter. He knows how to stop the questions. Sad stories always shut people up.

"There's not much to tell," Jack says slowly, pulling the memories back together and shaping them in his mind. "FS-12 was a just quiet planet, you know? Quieter than this one, even. We had an atmosphere good enough to farm and raise livestock, to feed ourselves for the most part, so we rarely even got any major traders other than for medicine and some kinds of tech. Except to bring replacement communications systems every now and then.

"And I didn't have much time to mess around. My father left us when I was just a kid—ditched us to…I don't know. Travel the stars, I guess. He was always talking about it." This comes out more bitterly than he means it to, so he clears his throat quickly. "It was just me and my mother and my little sister Maggie. We had to work for every scrap of food and clothes and everything we had, but we got by."

He trails off then, frowning as he wonders perversely how best to finish, how to leave the story—which is completely true—as raw and uncomfortable as possible so they'll stop asking him questions.

"Why did you leave?" Tooth prompts, looking up from her cooking. She's turned the heat down on whatever's boiling so that she can pay better attention.

"It was just…hard," he replied. "My planet, FS-12, it's a harsh place even in the summer, and it was always impossible to be sure how much of our livestock or crops would make it through the winters. Without Dad to help us through a few really tough winters, we started to run low on money. And my mother was…_sick, _or so she thought. The doctors couldn't find anything wrong with her exactly, but she swore there was something wrong with her. She was on every medication on this side of Boreas." He snorts. "Some days, we didn't have food, but we always had her medicine."

"Anyway," he says shortly, rubbing his forehead as the others inspect him in mild concern. He realizes that his story is veering side roads without him, as though it's a horse and wagon jostling just out of his control. The story he really needs to tell is the one for Mags, so he redirects his thoughts. "Anyway, my mother wasn't the reason I left. Well, she sort of was. But mostly, it was because of Mags. A couple months before I left, around her birthday, I got fed up with buying meds for our mother all the time—which sounds…kind of bad. But when we could barely afford…well, I'd had enough of it, anyway.

"Instead of going to the clinic that one time, I took the road to market, to the metalsmith. And for her birthday present, I had him make some ice skates—well, just the blades, really, so we could attach them to the boots ourselves. I surprised her with them, and I knew Mom was going to kill me over it when she found out, but cosmos, the look on Mags' face was _priceless._" The others echo his grin. "We snuck out a few times after that to play around on the pond in the woods behind our house, just her and me."

Jack falls silent for a moment, picturing is Mags twirling around the ice, stopping to steady herself, and then jetting off like a sparrow taking flight. "She got really good at it, actually," he adds. "But when the weather warmed a little one day, I was too preoccupied to really think about it, and we went anyway. If I'd have known the ice was so dangerous, I never would have…" he shakes his head.

"It's funny, because I used to carry this staff with me everywhere, an old, wooden shepherd's crook that my father gave me when I was younger. It was like—my most prized possession, almost. But this happened a while after he went off on one of the trader ships, and I guess I was still kind of angry about it. I carried the staff still, but looking at it kind of upset me, so I'd always put it aside. That day, I'd leaned it against a tree in the clearing so I could skate without it. If I'd had it, maybe things would've been different."

He rubs his arms, wondering. "What happened?" Tooth prompts gently, once it becomes apparent that he isn't going to continue on his own.

"The ice cracked under Mags," Jack says quietly. "I knew I couldn't drag her off of it in time, so I jumped toward her just as she started to fall. Bumped her head hard, but I was able to grab the edge of the ice before we sank into the water, and I got an arm around her waist. I just remember it being so cold, and being so scared that we were both gonna…I don't even know how I did it, but I managed to pull us both out of the water.

"When I got her up, she was bleeding and wasn't breathing, and she looked...and I didn't know anything much about CPR or anything, so I just sort of pounded on her chest. Might've been yelling too, I don't know. And she woke up coughing, so I stripped the blades off my boots and grabbed her up—couldn't bring her home, because I didn't know what Mom would say. I brought her to the clinic down the road, got the doctor to watch her. She had a bad concussion, and there was a scratch across the back of her head by her ear. He had to cut all her hair off to sew it back up; she looked like a boy for a while. Not that I ever told her _that_," he snorts.

"And of course there was no hiding it from Mom in the end. She never let me forget that it was my fault it happened, that if I'd just done what I was supposed to and bought her meds, none of that would've happened. To be honest, I don't know if she was more upset over Mags getting hurt or because she'd missed her pills. Either way, we treated Mags like a baby after that. Never let her do anything on her own. She needed medicine too, at that point, and the winter had _annihilated_ the crops, and the sheep were dying in the cold, and we didn't have the money for food or medicine or anything for a while.

"So I left. I left without even saying anything, just like our father did. It was a good thing she was with me when I went—even though she didn't know I was going 'till it was too late. But otherwise, she might have thought I'd been taken or something. Lots of people were leaving the planet for work back then, like I did, but some people were just gone—left or were taken without packing, without saying a word. Either way, even though she was there with me when I left, she probably still hates me for it, for leaving her alone there with Mom. I don't know. But we needed the money, and I knew I'd get paid, and I've wired almost everything I've made back home. I just never looked back."

The last part isn't really true, but Jack's done talking about it now. He scrubs at his face with his hands and looks down at the table. "I don't know. That's all."

"I'm so sorry, Jack," Tooth says softly, reaching out a hand as though to offer some comforting touch before lowering it. "I can't imagine…"

Jack shrugs one shoulder. "Yeah."

After a few beats, she turns back to her cooking, dropping the subject as though he told her to, and Sandy and North busy themselves with setting the table. Not Bunny, though. The Pooka rests his head on one paw, still staring at Jack.

"Gotta ask, mate," he begins quietly. "What d'you mean about disappearing people? What did that lot mean back there?"

For a moment, his earlier raw disbelief washes over him, but once it has ebbed away, Jack is left with a familiar feeling of bone-deep weariness, as though he's been dealing with a pack of children this whole time and their penetrating questions have finally worn him down. A laugh escapes on its own before Jack can catch it, and it's a bitter sound. "I still can't believe that, actually," he says wryly, shaking his head. "I still don't get how you don't _know. _I thought _everyone _knew. Thought people just didn't say it all the time because it was too troublesome or it's been happening for too long or _something._"

"I've never heard of…I mean, how many people are we talking about?"

"Are you serious? Thousands—maybe more—how would I know? No one's keeping track. But it was happening even back home on FS-12, kind of a steady thing. One winter, it'd be one or two people from the outskirts of town, then nothing for a while. Next thing you knew, a farmer disappeared in the middle of the day; left his cattle out in the pasture and everything. I wasn't around when it started to be just children, but I guess that's probably happened there, too.

"Once I got to HAB Sector planets like SCORPio, it was even harder _not _to notice—but maybe it wasn't _your _sort of people disappearing. Homeless people, mostly. People with transitory jobs, people who only meant to be on-planet for a day or two. People no one would miss. Maybe it was just because I knew what to look for, and it was like I was…I don't know, bookmarking people to see if they'd still be there when I came back. And then it was obvious. People from little side stalls or whole families living in the slums. Never enough people to draw IGC attention—that only happened out in the Reaches, where people were disappearing left and right."

"The _IGC _really does not know?" North asks. He leans heavily onto the table in interest, his beefy arms folded across the surface.

Jack snorts. "It sounds like the worst-kept, best-kept secret in the universe. No one knows about it except the people who can't do anything to stop it."

"Someone _has_ to have gone to the authorities!" Bunny protests, only half-disbelieving.

"The IGC doesn't care about planets from the Reaches. Nothing they can do out there, really. And the types of people disappearing from HAB Sector planets aren't exactly enough to inspire sympathy."

They are staring now, all of them with such surprise on their faces that it's almost painful for Jack to look at them, as though he's witnessing something he was never meant to see. It's not that _he's _surprised them, and he knows that, but it doesn't keep the embarrassment and anger from coursing through his veins. He feels his face redden slightly. "How could you not know?" he asks, and his voice again carries the same bitter warble.

There is no answer. How can there be? It's as though they're frozen, still processing the information he's given, and the bitterness fades. _Cosmos, _he thinks again. _They really are like a bunch of kids. How can you be angry at that?_

"Look," he says aloud, "this isn't—where I expected this kind of trip to end up." He rolls his eyes to the ceiling, gathering his thoughts. "I can't be here. I hate this place, and I—whenever we get repairs…I'm out of here. I'll book it back to the HAB with the shuttle. You don't have to worry about paying me or anything; I just can't be here anymore."

This snaps North out of his stupor. "But Jack, you are our pilot now! Perhaps this is—not what was expected, but we must press on!"

"I can't. I really can't."

"You're really backing down after we hit a _snag_?" Bunny asks incredulously, though his tone is muted, Jack thinks, by the pilot's recent stories.

"Like I said, this wasn't what I signed up for."

"We asked you to fly us to a planet out in the _Reaches, _mate—what did you think you'd signed up for?"

"What's that supposed to mean?" Jack asks hotly, though he quashes his anger: Bunny probably just means that most smuggler trips don't go according to plan, and he's right about that. "Nowhere did it say we were coming _here. _I'm not dealing with Pitch."

Almost as soon as he says the words, he wants to swallow them. Bunny is frowning at him. "What's Pitch got to do with anything?"

"You've got some connection with him, don't you?" Tooth realizes aloud, peering keenly at him. "You've been to the village on this planet, but your real connection here is to Pitch."

"There's no _connection,_" Jack snarls irritably. "I just hate him; that's all."

"You lied about what you know about this place," Bunny says.

"I haven't _lied._" Jack replies. "I just haven't told you everything. But you knew that; I told you I wouldn't."

"Look, Jack, you can't just—"

Sandy is suddenly on the table, and Jack realizes that he has likely been trying to get their attention for the last several minutes. He faces away from Jack, spitting out a violent swirl of symbols that come much too quickly for the pilot to decipher. For a moment, Jack stares at the engineer in confusion before realizing that Sandy is coming to his defense.

Whatever the sandman is saying, it makes the others slowly appear mollified, almost chastened. After a moment, Sandy hops down to stand on his chair, turning to Jack with a smile. Exaggeratedly, he feigns wiping sweat from his brow. The pilot can't help but smile, though it's tinged by confusion.

"Okay," Tooth says, when it becomes apparent that the others won't speak. Bunny glares at the floor as though it bears him some sort of ill will. "I'm…_we're_ sorry, Jack. We're being a little hard on you. Nothing in the job description says you can't back out if you're not comfortable, no matter what your reasons are. We'll call this trip a bust. All of us can catch the shuttle back to the HAB, and we'll figure out what to do from there."

Jack nods slowly. "Okay," he echoes. "For the record, I…" he hesitates.

Tooth nods. "We get it." A pause. "Jack, where will you go? Will you go home?"

"I don't _have _a home," Jack replies after a moment, shaking his head, "but anywhere's better than this rock. I'll find something."

"You have a family," Tooth presses, and she crosses her arms as though readying herself for a fight. He stares at her, wondering at her determination on this point, before he remembers what he knows of her past—how she once left her family at a young age too.

"I didn't say I didn't have family," he replies slowly.

"Then you have a home," she replies firmly. "I bet your sister misses you. Trust me. I'd know." Jack shifts uncomfortably, unwilling to let her see she's hit him. Before he can come up with a response, she cuts him off. "That's what family's about. When everything goes to hell, real families stick with you even when you hurt them. If they don't, they're not really family."

Jack frowns, suddenly irritated. "Thanks," he says. "Look, it's…gonna be a long next few days. I'm not all that hungry; I think—I think I'm gonna just turn in for the night."

They shift restlessly, exchanging meaningful glances Jack can't comprehend. There he is again, an outsider in their world in which they have known each other for so long that they can speak without words. _Look where it's gotten you, _he chastises himself. _Throwing in your lot with strangers._

After a beat, North nods. "Sleep now. I will contact help, but there will be much to do tomorrow. We will need a better, warmer hiding place if we are wanting to survive next few days."

Jack nods and leaves them to their dinner. Knowing that North will be using the communications systems in the cockpit later, he heads back into his assigned room instead of curling up in the pilot's chair to sleep.

Perhaps it's because he's unused to this darkened space, his starkly functional surroundings, the quiet whirr of the life support systems in the tubes above his head, but it's difficult to get comfortable in his bed. It should be the next few days that worry him as they scramble to ensure they have enough energy for the life support systems and stretch their food enough to last until rescue. But as he tosses and turns in the darkness, the only thing that fills his thoughts is Pitch.

His mind buzzes, and sleep takes a long time to come.

.

.

.

A/N: Jack finally reveals his and Maggie's past! It's been a long time in coming...though of course he blurts it all out just as he's planning to pack up and leave. We'll see where that gets him.

So I have to apologize for the title of the last chapter (originally "Continue? Yes / No"), which was meant as an allusion to old-school arcade games where you have to pay an extra quarter after so much time or so many levels. Apparently, it was instead taken as "this story may be discontinued or put on hiatus" and not as a reference to Jack and Bunny's mini gaming session while fighting the Orbas. So my apologies for the minor heart attacks I gave some of you! I did change it to "Continue Playing? Yes / No" a little while after, so hopefully the meaning was clearer for readers later in the week :-)

Also, this chapter is brought to you by space. Seriously. I probably wouldn't have been able or inspired to finish writing and editing in time for my self-mandated every-other-week deadline, except that I was completely captivated by the New Horizons data from NASA. The live briefings were completely awesome, so I sat down to work while I watched. Icy mountains? Water? Charon's Mordor? Pluto's adorable little heart? Space is _so amazing, _isn't it?!

In other news, I probably forgot to note this when he was originally mentioned two chapters ago, but readers of _Guardian of Guardians _may recognize Captain Nuada as That Asshole Leprechaun from Jamie's fiftieth birthday. He's an asshole in any universe, apparently.

Thanks to all of you who left comments, feedback, and criticism—it really does help, and I take all of your words into consideration as I continue writing! Thanks also to guest reviewers whom I couldn't thank by PM:

Guest TGS: I am a self-proclaimed research nerd. I can't help myself, haha! But yes, I'll have to include a bit more description in the eventual glossary! I think I probably have a few notes somewhere about the makeup of BL-13, but the descriptions don't always find their way into the story :-) Also, thanks for the feedback on the fighting scene, and I'm glad it went over well—it was REALLY fun to write, even though it was a bit difficult to slow things down and picture it in my head enough to describe it in detail.

Barbasol: Thanks so much! The feedback was really awesome, and it's so nice to hear that you're liking the characters and universe so far. Your comments seriously made my day!

Guest: Thanks for the review! Here's more of an update – finally! Hope it lives up to expectations :-)

As always, you guys are all awesome. Please let me know what you liked and didn't like about the chapter. It really helps!

Until next time, happy reading.

ket


	8. A Mild Case of Crazy

.

**Eight - A Mild Case of Crazy**

**.**

Jack is still half-awake when the world goes to hell.

His thoughts are muddied and vague when he hears the shout, which comes perhaps a little more than an hour after he first crawled into bed. The sound seems oddly distant, as though it has had to swim through his embryonic and formless dreams to reach him. The silence is heavy as he rolls back to awareness, and he sluggishly thinks he might have dreamed the noise after all.

Loud voices waft from outside his room, and, still half-lost in his dream, Jack wonders whether the others have gotten into the alcohol he'd seen stowed away in the back corner of the pantry. After a moment, though, a thrum of high, loud laughter reaches his ears. Jack stiffens, suddenly awake, because he knows that laugh, and he knows that it can't be here because the person who makes it _can't be here._

Loud voices, and then North's bellow: "—_not_ permitted here!"

Haltingly, Jack slips out of bed and opens the door. The whirr of the door's gears sounds loud in the quiet hallway, which is as dark as a moonless night on the plains of FS-12. For a moment, he's caught in the fleeting desire to _run away _somewhere safer, to leave and never look back—after all, the pilot can bear the temperatures and harsh chill of this planet, and he might even survive without food or water for long enough to be rescued by the next trade ship—but the thought slowly slips away. The fear that courses through him whenever Pitch's name is mentioned addles his thoughts still, but he finds himself, impossibly, creeping quietly toward the open kitchen door, which seems to be the source of the loud voices.

_Idiot,_ he chastises himself, even as his traitorous feet carry him slowly and carefully down the corridor. _One rule, remember? Every man for himself. _But the Guardians, so perplexingly naïve, have no idea who they are dealing with, and before Jack can register it, he's already crouched low to the ground and slipped across the floor to peer inside.

His body's sudden recoil is an instinctive gesture he can't quite stop. Before him, under the stark artificial lights of the kitchen, stands Pitch Black. His inky hair is windswept, his back turned to Jack as he faces the Guardians, who are glaring with a fierceness Jack has never seen from them before.

"I was_ wondering,_" Pitch says, and though the pilot can't see his face, he can make out the laughter in his voice, "who in the world would be foolish enough to cross _my _borders. It's…fitting that it's all of you."

As he speaks, Jack notices for the first time that he's holding an odd device in one hand, an oblong controller of some kind. Bunny is thumbing the boomerang at his side, and Jack realizes that they probably won't attack him. He can see in their faces, stiff with wary puzzlement, that they don't understand him entirely yet, can't see the gap between the face Pitch puts on as the benevolent pharmaceutical guru for the HAB Sector planets and the strange expression he's likely wearing now. Without sufficient provocation, they won't be the ones to make the first move.

It gives Pitch the upper hand, and he knows it. "I'm not pleased, you know," he remarks abruptly, as though they're simply discussing flavors of tea. "Having you here. But I suppose it doesn't really matter. It's not as though you'll have told anyone where you were going."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Tooth asks, her hands fisted at her sides as she hovers imperiously closer to him. "And _where _is our research, Pitch? Our prototype? We _know _you have it."

"My dear hummingbird!" Pitch laughs, turning with a sudden jerk to begin pacing back and forth as he speaks. Jack pulls back quickly to ensure that he's out of sight, waiting a second before coming closer. He peers around the threshold of the door with one eye. "Your prototype is useless to me. It's useless to you, too, now, of course; I stripped it apart almost as soon as I put my hands on it. You might be pleased to know that it _has _served a purpose—it helped get me closer to where I need to go, using some of your technology."

Tooth clenches her jaw. "Then give it what's left of it back and we'll go back the way we came," she retorts stiffly.

With this, he bursts out laughing, a full-bellied sound that makes Jack wince. The inventor, with the washed-out pallor of his skin, his sharp and brutal jawline, and his glowing golden eyes, has always had a frightening appearance. Now, though, there's something more, maybe in the unkempt mess of his hair or in his quick, jerky movements as he paces. Something that makes Jack wonder whether it's true that Pitch has finally lost it—stealing children in more and more obvious ways, stealing them from the local mining communities that have helped support him for so long.

As he slowly recovers from his shock, the pilot quickly considers the best course of action—with the little energy reserves they still have aboard the ship, all he can manage will be to extinguish the lights, which won't help anyone. Even the communications systems, which should have enough power to last a bit longer, won't help much when there's no one close enough to send aid in time. But if Jack can calm his racing heart, maybe he can harness his powers…

Pitch finally heaves a breath to recover from his outburst. "I'm not going to _give it back,_" he replies, and with the way his head is turned, Jack can make out an almost fond expression on his face. "Cosmos, I'm not even going to give _you _back. Of course, that may come back to bite me someday—the media will have a field day with your disappearances, and I'll have to sweep away any evidence that you were ever here."

A low sound of thunder. Jack realizes Bunny is growling deep in his throat. "Are you insane, Black?" he grinds out. The boomerang, the sharp one, is in one paw, and the pilot wonders when he took it out.

"Hah! Maybe," Pitch laughs again. The pilot wonders if Pitch is insane because of _him, _because of how Jack froze him solid under all of the ice he cast over the Black Industries facilities all those years ago. Maybe he lost a few brain cells there, too.

North's laser is out as well, and Sandy has hopped up onto the table, shimmering whips appearing in his arms.

"Hm," Pitch remarks casually. "That may work. Of course, it's unfortunate for you that I'm not alone."

At this, Jack starts just as he hears a slight shuffling sound from somewhere behind him. He turns to find—impossibly—that his exit through the narrow hallway of the ship is blocked by a _horse. _It's like no other horse Jack has ever seen on FS-12, one with a strange, shimmering sort of black skin and glowing golden eyes. It's impossibly thin as well, almost skeletal, and for one strange moment, Jack can't quite believe it's there, except that its warm breath in his face should be more than enough evidence.

_That's new,_ he thinks, but its existence in the narrow hallway of the_ Guardian _is still so impossible that he barely reacts when it darts forward to bite down on the shoulder of his jacket, dragging him across the floor to slide him into the room.

And suddenly, he's looking up into Pitch's face, which opens with genuine amazement. They stare at each other for a moment, every muscle in Jack's body tensing of its own will, before Pitch throws his head back in an incredulous, almost hysterical laugh.

The sharp sound jolts Jack into movement, and he scrambles away to climb to his feet, his back to the wall. "The prodigal son returns!" Pitch cackles, his laughter almost choking him. "All that searching and you've come back all on your own." He pauses, wheezing as he catches his breath, and the Guardians look in confusion from him to Jack.

"You know Jack?" North asks.

"_Know _him?" Pitch cries, one arm darting out to grab Jack's forearm before the pilot can react. He tries to squirm away, but the horse blocks his path. There are more of them now, five or six of the impossible creatures having drifted into the room. "Why, I _created _him, didn't I Jack? Now why wouldn't you tell your _friends_ that?"

Jack's not a fighter, but at such close range, he can start to make things a little colder; he feels the frost beginning to build up in his blood as he calls it forth. As though he realizes what Jack is thinking, Pitch drops his arm. "Ah, ah! Not this time."

Even so, Jack has already begun, concentrating ferociously to pour his powers onto the floor, stringing ice along the tiles and up Pitch's leg, but two of the horses grab him by the jacket and drag him bodily away, back toward the door, and the most that happens is that the floor between them adopts a silvery sheen, with swirls of frost billowing across the surface at their feet.

It's the concentration that kills Jack every time, he knows, struggling against the beasts' clamped teeth. The last time, when he froze over the facilities, he'd been strangely emotionless, determined, as though the act of creating blocks of ice where air used to be was less of an impossible feat and more of an action as natural as breathing. As though he wouldn't have died if he hadn't managed it. It had taken him ages to come to that state of mind, to concentrate so completely, and he scowls at himself now for his own weakness.

Pitch is staring at him benevolently, as though he's a willful pet performing some adorable act of misbehavior. It's a new look, and it's somehow more frightening than the looks of calculation Jack remembers. "Oh, don't worry, Jack. We'll work on it together."

This makes Jack squirm harder against the strange beasts surrounding him. The Guardians, who moved forward when Pitch and his steeds began to manhandle him, still have expressions of frozen surprise across their faces. Bunny grips his boomerang tightly, holding it out before him as though he'd almost thrown it but has in the end forgotten that the weapon exists at all, an almost comical confusion in his dark eyes. Sandy has doubled over in wonder to inspect the frozen floor, but it's Tooth who draws Jack's gaze: both hands are clapped to her mouth, and her eyes are suspiciously shiny.

He opens his mouth—to say what? _I'm sorry I didn't tell you _or _Yeah, I don't like talking about mods because I'm the result of one _or _Actually, Pitch finalized the tech you're looking for _years_ ago_—but the horses pull at him again, and he swallows the words.

"Why don't we go get started?" Pitch asks, clapping his hands together. "We do have a lot to catch up on, after all." He half-turns, making for the door, before he frowns, pauses, and turns back to the Guardians. "But I don't need _you._" Facing the horse standing in the doorway, a particularly large one, Pitch orders: "Take care of them. Make sure they aren't…_found._"

With that, he sweeps out of the doorway and into the hall; the dark horses push and pull Jack toward it almost before he can react. He has just enough time to turn before they shove him into the hallway. The Guardians are crying out now, their faces torn between shock and anger as the remaining horses press in upon them. As Jack is pulled over the threshold, a few more of the shimmering black beasts pour into the room like liquid, and loud crashes reach his ears.

He'd liked the Guardians, he thinks stupidly. The thought is tempered by his own approaching peril, of course, and he's surprised that he thought it at all, but in the few seconds he can spare to think about their deaths, he wishes things had gone differently, that he'd somehow managed to convince them of Pitch's danger before they'd arrived.

In the next instant, they are spilling from the ship entirely, and he is half-led and half-dragged down the ramp and into the freezing night air of BL-413. Outside of the alcove is one of the Orbas, its blue lights casting long, dark shadows across the rock-strewn trench. It still bears evidence of Bunny's target practice from the day before, deep streaks across its hull.

The cold wakes him up from his daze, and realizes suddenly that if Pitch gets him onto this ship, it's all over—Jack will be where he was three years ago, and there's no way Pitch is stupid enough to let the pilot escape twice, brain damaged or not. The pilot begins to struggle wildly against the handful of horses, beating his fists against them and straining to get away, but they only tug at him, nonchalantly continuing to press and pull him almost gently. He can't stand still enough to concentrate for any serious damage, but he manages to lightly freeze their clamped jaws as they pull him, the glimmering ice creeping down their necks and across their bodies. Impossibly, they simply shake it off; it cracks away and onto the ground like broken glass.

"They can regulate heat and cold," Pitch says conversationally at his side. Jack jumps just as they step onto the ramp. He turns wildly, nearly falling as he trips across the metal, which makes the inventor lift one eyebrow in amusement. "It's come in handy these past few months. Not that I've ever gotten anyone as close to perfection as I did you. We haven't really needed their thermal regulation." He smiles. "We call them Nightmares, by the way—clever, isn't it?"

Jack yanks his jacket away from one of the horses as best he can, but it just bites the back of the garment this time. He has the insane thought that this is his best leather jacket, and the teeth marks will ruin the leather. He could probably slip out of it, but he has the feeling that the beasts might just begin biting him and dragging him by the skin instead. "Why didn't you just knock me out?" he asks irritably, trying to remove the warble of fear that nearly creeps into his voice. "It would've been easier on us both—you wouldn't have had to deal with me fighting, and I wouldn't have to listen to you _talk_."

The pilot knows the answer to this question, but Pitch's oddly affectionate reaction frightens him more than he can say. The inventor reaches out, the Nightmares parting like water, and he runs a hand through Jack's hair before the pilot can even react. "I need what's in your head," he says simply, patting the pilot as though he's a pet. Jack tries to bat his hand away, but one of the horses grabs his sleeve and pulls his arm down. "No drugs and no knockouts for you, Jack."

He strides away, Jack staring at him incredulously until he realizes that they are no longer moving. At his right, the ramp is closing slowly. The pilot makes one halfhearted attempt to go toward it, but the Nightmares block his path. He peers at the distant alcove, which is dimly lit by the faint glow of the_ Guardian's _remaining life support systems, until it finally disappears behind the rising metal.

.

Upon closer inspection, Jack realizes that the outside of Pitch's facility is striated by deep scorch marks in the metal, blackened gouges that look like scars. Morning sunlight has begun to bleed over the horizon, an eerie sort of neon green that lengthens and sharpens the shadows of the ridges and the laboratory buildings growing from them.

The pilot's stiff legs protest his movement as the dark horses hustle him off of the ramp and onto the ground, which at this altitude is blanketed by snow and slick layers of ice that crack under his boots. He spent the last hour cramped in a tiny ball in the corner of the cabin Pitch had locked him in, his arms clasped around his legs and his forehead pressed to his knees. The Nightmares never let him have a moment's peace, always pushing gently closer to him or snorting their hot breaths over his hair as though to remind him that there was no point in movement, that he wasn't alone, that he might never be again.

The bare cabin walls were reinforced with durable, weatherized titanium, and it—like the horses themselves—simply sloughed off the ice that accumulated. Jack had tried freezing the room as soon as Pitch had left him. The horses had barely moved, as if they knew his actions would be useless. As if in punishment, the temperature of the room began to rise to a scorching heat—not a humid one, whose water Jack might have used to cool himself off, but a bone-dry desert heat. The temperature made Jack nauseous and left him feeling fevered even after Pitch had finally ordered his Nightmares to drag the pilot out.

It's almost as though Pitch has prepared for him to be here, as though he's known all the while—perhaps for years—that he would eventually stumble across his star experiment once more.

Dazedly, Jack shakes this thought away, because the idea makes him feel even sicker, and he's already terrified enough at whatever lies inside of the facility. "The hell happened there?" he manages finally, jerking his head toward the scorched wall of the lab. The action makes him sway a little, and Pitch, who has not let Jack out of his sight since removing him from the cabin, looks him up and down in clinical concern.

"Ah, that," Pitch replies. "We did need to remove the ice you left as a parting gift, after all. It was slightly…inconvenient."

Jack snorts, because he sees through the careful blankness to Pitch's face. The pilot's "parting gift" had been to fill the most essential rooms in the facility with a steady tide of rising ice, freezing solid all of the electronic equipment and any of the doctors and staff who had been stubborn enough to remain inside at their stations even after the warning alarms had begun to scream. And, of course, Pitch himself—it was hard to forget _that, _especially since Jack had personally seen to it that the inventor had been frozen to a wall before Jack himself had made his escape to freeze the outsides of the building, sealing away everything that had ever hurt him in what he had imagined would be an eternally frozen grave.

That it is _not _is still a source of surprise to Jack. "How'd you manage it?" he asks, striving for nonchalance. At the way Pitch's concern melts into amusement, the pilot has the feeling the tone is not what he was seeking.

"You are hardly the _only _successful subject I have worked on," he says as they approach the heavy metal doors standing at the building's entrance. He nods at the shimmering black horses who guard it, one on either side, and the doors slowly hiss open. "The _most _successful, to be sure, and the only living success at this point, but at the time, there were others."

The casual way Pitch relays this information makes Jack shudder. "'Were?'" he echoes.

Pitch continues as though he has not spoken. "There was one promising subject at the time who had been created to wield fire much as you wield ice. _Cherufe _was his code name, as yours is _Frost. _Like you, his powers were relatively new to him, and the signs left on the walls are…a testament to this fact."

"'Were?'" Jack repeats. The laboratory spills out before him, a wide and open space with a central hub of curved monitors and keyboards manned by a handful of techs who stare flatly at him as they enter. Along the walls and floors are more deep striations, similar scorches to the ones at the outside of the building. Toward the ceiling at tilted angles hang more monitors, wide and buzzing, their colors slightly greened with age. There are people on these monitors, people in the small cells and the kind of bleary, blank state that Jack was once so accustomed to. Again, nausea roils in the pit of his stomach.

Pitch sighs in irritation. "Yes, _were._ He outlived his usefulness, you might say. Some of my staff managed to free me, you see, and we solicited his aid. For a time, he helped as ordered, but this soon ended because he attempted to leave. At that point, he had to be disposed of."

Jack gives the inventor a long, wary look. The Nightmares nudge him after Pitch and toward a long hallway, gloomy for its dimmed or missing light fixtures—some of them are just exposed wire now. "Wait, you…that happened _just after? _Almost _three__ years ago? _And the lab is still _this_ ugly—?"

"Appearance is not the important thing," Pitch interrupts, and the expression he points at Jack is mischievous, almost conspiratorial. "The important thing is results. And now that _you've _come back to us…well. We might learn ways of being _more successful._" Again, he reaches out an arm as if to stroke Jack's hair, but the pilot flinches back this time. Pitch drops it to his side.

"You're still doing this," Jack says flatly. "After all that, you're still…"

Pitch waves his hand dismissively. "As I said, a minor inconvenience." An odd smirk crosses his features. "As a matter of fact, there's something I believe you might want to see."

.

At the rear of the facility is an open, icy tract of land that runs about a hundred yards before dropping away into another deep trench. It's outfitted as a landing dock, with well-maintained metal platforms kept clear of snow, one of them stretching out over the trench itself.

In the glowing light of the new day, the sun fighting through to stretch its light across the cold air, Jack watches as one of the hulking ships is emptied, its ramp lowered to unload its cargo: children. Dozens of them.

They seep slowly from the docked ship, blinking and disoriented in the sudden brightness after who knows how long spent in the dark. As he watches, a little girl lifts herself onto the balls of her feet, stretching her arms into the air. Others shuffle with stiff, unwieldy limbs, their faces bleary as though they've not quite yet remembered how to walk. Most of them are tiny things, arms wrapped around their own thin chests or their fists clenched in the pockets of their coats as they shiver in the cold air, but some of them seem to be just a few years younger than Jack.

They aren't all human, either. The pilot can make out the shimmering skin of a young water nymph, her silvery hair tucked under a thick woolen wrap, and two squat little goblin boys—brothers, by their identical sharp noses and bright eyes, both of them huddled together for warmth—and a small tribe of what can only be the missing leprechaun children, their red hair stark against the icy landscape behind them.

Their babbling voices flow to Jack on the wind, all of them talking and asking and shouting and _laughing, _because they to them this may as well be a field trip; they don't _know, _they have _no idea _what is waiting for them in the days to come.

The pilot grits his teeth, knowing that Pitch is watching his reaction closely. When he thinks he can trust himself to speak without screaming, he manages, "Why are they here? You can't mean to use them—not so many of them."

"The younger, the better," Pitch replies simply, turning back to the growing mass. A small team of his staff, outfitted in black clothing, herds them slowly toward the building. Jack and Pitch stand out in the open field between the docks and the laboratory. For a brief moment, Jack had considered running, but the occasional dark movements at the corners of his eyes always turn out to be Pitch's steeds lingering watchfully some distance away. "We learned that with you, of course. You were the youngest we'd ever taken, and things turned out so unexpectedly _well—_it's still surprising, isn't it?"

Jack closes his eyes. "Why aren't your horses closer?" he asks.

"They don't need to be. They're near enough to react to anything that might happen. It wouldn't be prudent at this point to use them as obvious guards—I'm certain you can imagine why. Their appearances are…well, glowing eyes and metal skin aren't the most welcoming picture. And we don't want to frighten the children. Yet." He beams down at them, and then the smile melts away into something more sinister, a dark expression that Jack cannot name. "That's the fun part. _What are you afraid of?" _he asks the distant flock of children. "_What do you fear most in the world?"_

At some point, all of Jack's muscles have stiffened on their own in some instinctive reaction to Pitch's presence while the pilot's mind has been busy in panic. His legs and shoulders ache with the strain of it, and he makes a conscious effort to relax. "They're _children,_" he spits out finally.

Pitch frowns. "It doesn't matter. Everyone is afraid of something. It's just a matter of learning _what. _You remember that part, don't you, Jack? _Your_ greatest fear? The dark water of the pond in the woods behind your house. Your sister screaming. Your sister dying."

"And you just _pressed _that and _wouldn't let it go, _even—" Jack breathes out sharply, covering his face. The children are almost upon them, a strangely sinister horde of them he thinks might swallow him whole.

"Let it go?" Pitch echoes, his golden eyes gleaming as his gaze pierces Jack's skin. His voice, tinged with warmth, begins to rise. "Why would I have done that? Why would you have _wanted _me to, especially after it's made you all you are today? That's all we want, Jack—that's all anyone wants. To face their fears and become something stronger. Imagine an entire world where _everyone _has done that, where powers like yours are commonplace—"

"And all of the _drugs _and months spent _locked away _and—all that's just a part of your vision of the future?"

"Those are necessary side effects—"

"And all of the people who don't make it? What's your success rate, Pitch? Besides me, who else_ is _there?"

Pitch's gaze, once filled with a sort of malicious mischief, darkens again to something colder and more sinister. "You're pretty much it," he allows. "You were the first successful experiment. And now, you're the only one left."

Jack steps back as though Pitch has struck him. He had known from the beginning that the success rates were abysmal. Those he had entered the facilities with had slowly disappeared, and after that, he'd rarely seen the same face for more than a handful of days at a time. And Pitch had mentioned that one of the other successes, Cherufe_, _had lost control, just as Jack himself often did, but in a much more potent and destructive manner. But Jack had never imagined that the number could possibly be so low, and to his surprise, there's something lonely about it.

Not that he truly wishes his life on anyone else, but to be the only one alive in the universe to have endured what he has is more of a burden than he wants to bear.

The children, led by the guards, flow slowly past, looking between Jack and Pitch with idle curiosity. The pilot wishes for a crazed moment that he could shuffle them all back onto the ship and fly them away, but he has no more recourse to get them off the surface of this rock than he does to escape by himself.

"You _idiot,_" he says, the words tumbling out of his mouth before he can stop himself. "You really have taken it too far, haven't you? When the IGC finds out, they'll stop you for sure."

Pitch cackles suddenly, a whole-body laugh. "The IGC? Really? When I have my pharmaceutical _headquarters _among the HAB Sector planets, when I filch children from _under their noses—"_

"Jackson! Jackson!" A bubbly, excited voice reaches Jack's ears, and it's so out of place that he doesn't react right away, finding himself almost unable to believe in the incongruous noise. "Jack, over here!"

Bobbing excitedly in the crowd is a small boy with an unruly mop of dark hair and deep, serious eyes. As he weaves through the sleepy children, he tugs a small girl by the hand, one with straw-colored hair and a thin wool coat whose collar she is patiently nibbling. It takes Jack a moment to place the boy's pink-cheeked face, which, though familiar, is somehow hard to grasp, like trying to catch a darting tadpole with your bare hands.

The boy smiles at him, and Jack's eyes widen as the kid snaps into place: Jamie Bennett from FS-12. Fresh-faced, seven-year-old Jamie who had clung to his side most of the last year Jack was there, stuck like a burr on wool, trailing behind him with his unending babble and cheerful grins. Jamie asking for help with the crops and the animals and the worn-down Bennett home, and did Jack know how to fix a roof? Jamie with the sick mother—because hadn't they bonded over that in the end, their ailing mothers, even though it was different because Jamie actually loved his?

It's been three years since the pilot has seen Jamie Bennett, and his first thought is that Jamie is too small for ten, his limbs skinny and coltish, his grin too big for his face. He's short too, and Jack wonders how much the kid has had to scrounge for food these last few years. Not that Jack would bring that up—he knows Jamie well enough not to comment.

Jamie reaches Jack, still dragging the girl, and shifts restlessly, almost uncertainly, before he leans forward to squeeze Jack around the waist in a one-armed hug before backing away. Jack, still utterly shocked by this development, hasn't made a move. "You—you're here?" he manages.

"Yeah, but I didn't know _you _were here too. It's been, like—years! The collectors are taking kids only now, or I guess kids mostly. And I mean, they pay us and feed us here, and since there's no one else to take us, it's better than Mrs. Marm's. Probably."

"Mrs. Marm's?" Jack parrots. All his frazzled brain can manage to do is cling to Jamie's words. Mrs. Marm runs the local orphanage, or the closest thing their tiny settlement has, just her and a handful of children living off scraps in her dingy grey home.

"Yeah."

"Your mom?"

"Our mom's dead," the little girl pipes up matter-of-factly, removing her soaked collar from her mouth for only the instant it takes her to speak before she pops it back in.

"This is Sophie," Jamie explains. "My little sister. I just thought it would be better…"

He doesn't need to continue. Better food. A better home. A better life. The Collectors promise all of that and more. It's no wonder Jamie has come, but Jack feels a roll of nausea in his stomach at the thought of Jamie here—and at the thought of Pitch's current success rate.

"A fascinating development," Pitch purrs, smiling benevolently, though he's peering up at the sky instead of at the pair of children. "I'm sure your time here will be interesting."

The other children have passed, all of them crowding toward the facility's open doors. Jamie looks after them, and then he warily glances at Pitch. "I'm gonna catch up," he tells Jack shortly. "But um, I'll see you around, right?" His eyes are hopeful, and Jack realizes the courage it must have taken him to fly all clear across the universe and away from the only home he's ever known to arrive here on this ice-ridden planet, all of this based on his trust in the words of the Collectors. The words of Pitch.

Jack nods fiercely and reaches out to squeeze his shoulder. "I will _definitely _be around." He says this more to Pitch than to Jamie, a sort of territorial marker. Pitch says nothing. He seems distracted by a thought and presently turns a vague frown toward something in the distance, but at Jack's words, he offers another brief, amused smile.

"Okay!" Jamie chirps. "I'll see you later, then." He guides his sister away, their worn boots crunching through the ice and snow, and Jack turns his back so he won't have to watch them be swallowed into the depths of the laboratory.

Pitch is still frowning. Jack follows his gaze, and it's then that he sees it: a bright light in the darkened dawn sky, slow as a snowflake drifting to the earth, gleaming like a falling star. Another ship gliding in with its cargo of children, maybe. But Pitch's expression is one of vague confusion, and when the pilot looks back at the star, he realizes that its size is familiar to him.

He's moving before he can change his mind, away from Pitch and out into the open toward the facility where Jamie and the children are, to—what, grab them all while fighting off the team of staff and Nightmares? Impossible. Pitch breaks free of his confusion to shout orders from somewhere behind the pilot, and he was right about the black horses; one is directly before Jack before he can so much as cry out, clamping its teeth hard onto the flesh of his forearm. The pain is mind-blowing, but Jack just swears vehemently and freezes as much of the creature's head and neck as he can. It won't stop it, but all he needs to do is slow it down.

Another is behind him, and he yanks his arm away and rolls through the snow to put some distance between them. The ship shudders as it approaches, the_ Guardian _impossible and gleaming in the dawn light, speeding overhead in great, shuddering jolts and weaving uncertainly in the air. Jack dodges another Nightmare, spilling his ice across the ground to slow the horses' movements as he watches the thrusters flicker.

When the ship moves to the ground, it's less of a graceful landing and more of a near crash; the landing gear scrapes against the rocky surface as the_ Guardian _hovers in the air. The ramp plummets down, and Jack blasts away another horse, which recovers quickly to snap at his side, but he's already running, his steps sure against his own ice.

He has to leap onto the ramp, which now hovers several feet above the ground, but as soon as he's certain he won't fall, he shouts "Raise it and _go_!" and hopes that they will hear.

Pitch is below, shouting—screaming. The ramp begins to rise and Jack rolls inside, but he turns in time to see the inventor's starkly murderous face, spit flying from his jaws, hands running through his hair as though he needs to do _something _to _someone. _And then the sliver of his vision closes as the ramp shuts entirely.

For a moment, he takes several quick breaths on the floor of the cargo bay, feeling the rumble of the engine below, hearing the struggling hum of the internal life systems, unable to fully grasp what has happened. Then, he laughs up at the ceiling. He picks himself up, clambering to his feet to take the stairs to the cockpit two at a time. Tooth and North hang out from the doorway to the cockpit, staring at him in openmouthed wonder as though they can't fully believe it either. Sandy and Bunny, seated in the pilot's and navigator's seats respectively, swivel around to grin at him, having obviously been the main actors in this little venture.

Jack still doesn't know how he feels about them, their naïve outlooks and their strange camaraderie, and he should be asking how they found him and how they got the ship working in the first place, but he only laughs again and scrubs a hand across his face.

"Knew it was you guys," he says at last. "That was probably the worst piloting I've ever seen. What were you thinking flying my ship so haphazardly?"

.

.

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A/N: So it's been a month, and I'm terribly sorry. I had an irl vacation and then a work crisis and now I may be making some huge life changes in the near future…so the expected two-week turnaround obviously didn't happen. Good news is that I'm currently working on the next chapter, so here's hoping the timing works out better in the future!

Anyway, I realized that in _Guardian of Guardians, _I never actually wrote anything with Pitch _in _it; the characters just talked about him a lot, and he influenced the story from outside of the actual narrative. So I guess this can be considered a weird effort to fix that. And Pitch is so much fun to write! I've been having a lot of fun making him _slightly _more insane than he is in the movie, based on the idea that serious brain injury can be a result of severe hypothermia. His motivations are a bit different as well, I suppose: instead of wanting for the world to be dark and for everyone to fear him, he…wants to make the world a better place. With mods for everyone. He's just not going about it in the kindest way :-)

Also, Pitch's fire-wielding and unfortunately deceased victim's codename (Cherufe) is borrowed from _Guardian of Guardians_ as well; he's the volcanic lizard titan that the Guardians rope Jamie into helping them fight when he's older.

Side note: Jamie is 10 years old in this fic (Jack last saw him when he was 6; 4 years have passed since then). There's apparently some controversy over the age he's meant to be in the film, as the script says 8 and the companion book says 10. I needed him a bit older here, but I did start him off at 8 back in _Guardian of Guardians, _so don't get confused!

Another very sincere **thank you **for all of your reviews, feedback, and predictions—it really helps! Here are a few notes to guest reviewers whom I couldn't thank by PM:

Guest: Thank you so much! Here's that update :-)

GuestTGS: Hahaha, the suspense worked out, then! As for the ice-skating thing, I think I decided _not _to go the blades or fire route because I thought it might stray from the canon kind of origin story a bit too much for my liking, but it was definitely on the table for a while. Also, I'm really glad that all of the characters' reactions made sense to you—because that can be really hard to work out sometimes, so it's a relief to hear! I definitely wanted the Guardians to show their shrewd sides in the last chapter, so I'm glad that came across, even if they obviously completely dropped the ball with the disappearances (haha, and it's also so funny to me that you were gunning for a story featuring the disappearances of un-missed characters…but what can I say? Sometimes, you're just looking for that _one thing! _:-D ) And as for Pitch…well, he's both insane and really crafty, so I'm definitely trying to work on making sure that he shows himself to be a real threat here (i.e. that his bark isn't worse than his bite), so you'll have to tell me how he does once both sides butt heads in earnest next chapter! As always, thanks for your supremely awesome reviews. I can't overstate how helpful it is to hear your thoughts and reactions!

Barbasol: Yeah, Jack's heart was definitely in the right place…although as a teenager, I think he probably wasn't in the best position to be making huge life decisions like he was. But in his defense, the circumstances with Mags and his mom messed with his head—and as a kid, what do you do but run from your problems, really? Anyway, to answer your question, yes, feel free to put up some predictions!I don't consider predictions to be spoilers (even if they're completely on the mark) because they're great at showing how the story matches expectations, which can be really helpful. Plus, I think it's just fun to see them, whether reading or writing :-)

Hope you enjoyed reading the update. If you can, please let me know what you thought!

Stay gold,

ket


	9. Your Friendly Science Enrichment Center

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**Nine – Your Friendly Science Enrichment Center**

**.**

"A tracker," Jack says flatly.

Tooth looks at him sheepishly as she rolls up the sleeve of his hoodie to take a look at the bite on his arm. His jacket, which rests across the back of his chair, looks as though he ran through a field of thorns and brambles.

"It wasn't even that hard to do—I mean, once I realized you only wear the one pair of boots when you're off-ship, and you always leave them in the cockpit..." Blotches of blue and purple already leak across his forearm—and, if the pain is any indication, probably across his side as well—where Pitch's horses bit the skin. There's nothing Tooth can do about this, though, so she rolls his sleeve back down and pats his arm gently. When she realizes that he's staring, she adds, "It was mostly for the beginning, anyway. We didn't _know _you, and you could've been a flight risk. What if we'd gotten all the way here and the stranger we hired decided to make off with our work in the end?"

"Huh." Jack bends down to look at his boots then back up at the others. No light from outside bleeds through the windshield of the_ Guardian, _but in the dying overhead light, he can see Sandy and North shift uneasily in their seats. Only Bunny, leaning casually against the dashboard of the cockpit, meets his gaze head on. "Where did you even put it?" the pilot asks.

"In the grooves at the bottom of your left heel."

The pilot pulls his leg up and cranes to see the sole of his boot. Sure enough, Jack pulls a pinned transmitter from deep in one of the grooves. "Looks like we all have trust issues."

"Speaking of trust issues, mate," Bunny says calmly, "I know you don't really feel comfortable with us yet, but I think it's time we knew everything you know about Pitch. If we're gonna get out of this mess, we'll need all the info we can get."

The_ Guardian's _flight across the trenches to reach Jack was done on a wing and a prayer. Sandy has explained to Jack—with a bit of Bunny's translation—that although it was unclear whether the Nightmares could be _destroyed, _per se, the group had managed to beat the horses back and off of the ship. Jack has seen the Guardians' weapons, but it's still difficult for him to imagine any of them actually _fighting, _let alone _well_—and they obviously have fought well, as he can see no serious injuries on any of them. Once the group managed to close the ramp on the horses, Sandy fumbled through the ship's power settings to divert all power to flight systems, allowing them to take off after Jack and Pitch by using the last of the energy and fuel reserves that had initially been meant to last them the next several days.

It's a hopeless situation, even if Jack imagines none of them will say so aloud. The_ Guardian, _though well-hidden in another deep crevice, is very close to Pitch's laboratories, and it's only a matter of time before he finds them. Without flight or weapon capabilities on the ship, or even life support systems for central heating, it makes little sense to stay aboard. But he's not so sure about their chances outside with Pitch, either.

Bunny has moved nearer, Jack realizes suddenly. The Pooka stands beside him, arms folded, his head tilted in curious concern. The cockpit is dark, the lights dimming slowly like a dying candle, but what the pilot can see of the expression is a great deal kinder than it might have been a week ago. Jack wonders when the Pooka's irritation toward him softened. "How about it, Frost?" he asks. "What's going on?"

Jack frowns, pulling his knees up to sit cross-legged on the chair. It's a reasonable question, one they've probably deserved an honest answer to for some time, but even as Jack's mind senses the logic of it, another part of him can't find a way to push the words out. "It's a long story" is all he finally manages. His voice sounds small even to his own ears.

"We need to know it," Bunny replies, filling the silence. Jack looks away, running his fingers across the useless dashboard. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Tooth prod Bunny's side, suggesting something to him in some silently mouthed word or meaningful look, and Bunny crouches at Jack's side. "Look, Jack, it probably isn't easy to explain this stuff, but we really do need to know. And what about—whatever you were doing down there with the ice? You…you froze that cyborg, too, didn't you, back on Eskarth? How did you…that's not…human?"

This last part comes out as a question, and the Pooka glances over his shoulder at North as if for confirmation. The captain rolls his eyes and shakes his head. It might have been funny if Jack weren't so _tired _all of a sudden.

"Who says I'm human?" Jack asks wearily, resigning himself to explaining.

"Are you not?" North asks. "You appear to be one."

"I don't really know anymore," Jack admits. He shakes his head. "Why in the cosmos did you come back for me? With Pitch thinking you were dead, you could've…I don't know, found another village or something. Bartered for a shuttle. You could've even just waited for the help you asked for. If you hadn't decided to _fly _her, you had enough energy and fuel reserves to last you a few days."

"You are a part of our crew," North replies easily. "We don't leave a crewmate behind."

Tooth nudges North gently with her shoulder, looking at him in amusement. She turns to Jack. "You're stuck with us now, Jack, like it or not. Whatever happens."

Jack snorts. A while ago, this statement would have seemed utterly useless to him. Why would he _want _to be a part of their little party? What good were they to anyone, after all? But there's something almost childlike in the way they doggedly return to his side, the way they won't let him go. Something oddly touching.

The cabin lights have all but gone out, and the only thing that lights the blackened room is the gentle, dim shimmer of Sandy's skin. Ice has begun to creep across the windshield. Tooth shivers under her coat, her breaths visible in the cold air.

Jack feels none of this.

"Okay," he says at last. And then he begins to talk. He has to start the story instantly, as if to surprise his own mind. If he gives himself enough time to consider it or to choose his words, he'll overthink and back down.

So he explains how the job he'd taken in order to feed and care for his family turned out not to be a _job, _exactly. Instead, the Collectors, Pitch's men, kindly brought them into the laboratory and locked the door behind them.

After that, all Jack remembers is the endless testing, centuries of machines and scans and pills and dermal infusers. He remembers fading into a shell of himself, as though he was watching Pitch and his doctors work on someone else on the screen of his holo-comm. He remembers he slow, palpable changes to the structure of his body, a numb sort of coldness that never went away, the tang of chemicals in his mouth, the steady wash of drugs that had the odd side effect of lightening his hair and eyes until his reflection became a stranger.

He remembers being alone in a crowd, because there was no point in making friends with people who would most likely disappear inside of a week. He never learned what happened to them or to their bodies, but he can guess.

He explains how things had slowly changed once Pitch began to realize his success, how the testing had shifted toward seeing what Jack could do, how he would react to external stimuli. He remembers Pitch locking him into a weatherproofed room, and he remembers ice and frost spilling out of him uncontrollably until he felt like he'd bled himself dry.

And then he explains how he'd gained enough control over his powers to freeze Pitch to a wall, the inventor's eyes furious, how Jack's ice had lashed out almost without his knowledge to begin filling the rooms he ran through like a rising tide, how he'd frozen solid every exit he could find to trap everything inside, to seal it all away. How he'd stolen a shuttle in the night and taken off.

"Pitch probably never really guessed I'd do anything like that," he adds, realizing this as he speaks the words aloud. "He didn't think I had anywhere I could get to without freezing to death, but the cold doesn't bother me anymore. It's like I don't even feel it. All of his tests covered what I could _do, _not what I could _survive_. I found the village based on hearsay I'd heard from the guards. The shuttle I took didn't even have an interstellar Nav board—if I'd been anyone else, I'd've probably been crushed by random space detritus at some point, or I'd've wandered around forever without finding a place to land until I died.

"But instead I learned…" he pauses, shaking his head. "It's the powers Pitch gave me that make me such a good pilot. I can feel the space around me, how warm and cold things are, where the nearest sun or comet is. Even without any experience flying, it was like it came naturally to me. And I felt okay there. For the first time…maybe ever. I almost _starved _to death, of course—by the time I made it far enough out of the Kambaba Galaxy to feel safe and stumbled across the first inhabited planet, I ate a _mountain _of food.

"After that, I've been…well, doing stuff like this. Or what _this _was supposed to be. Freelance smuggling, jobs for experienced pilots, stuff like that. I send almost everything I make back home, keep my head down to stay off anyone's radar. I guess I always sort of worried that if anyone find out, I'd be locked away again, and that if I went home and someone found out, they'd drag my family into it. And I think a part of me has always been worried about Pitch, even though I _knew _he was dead; it was like I was worried about his ghost. Like I said, I just keep moving."

"I'm so sorry, Jack," Tooth says, her voice hitching a little. "I can't believe…I can't _imagine…_" She shifts in her seat, covering her mouth with her hands.

"This does explain why you want nothing more to do with Pitch," North adds, his expression intent.

Jack snorts. "Yeah, once I realized where we were going, I wanted to turn around right then and there. But it was a job, and I had every reason to believe there was nothing here but ice. I guess I hoped…I don't know. That it was a bunch of traders or smugglers hiding out."

Tooth's expression is difficult to read in the dark, but Jack thinks it might be identical to the one he'd seen before Pitch had dragged him away, a soft sort of wonder. "But you really froze everything over? You really…genetic modification. It really worked."

"It really did," he replies warily. "But I'm not sure it was worth it." For a second, he harbors the paranoid fear that this has all been his greatest mistake, that telling this group of inventors—who are after tech for _genetic mods_—about his past will get him thrown into a cozy cell somewhere for the rest of his life.

Tooth stiffens, her feathers fluffing a little as if sensing his thoughts. "That's not what I meant, Jack. It's just...from a completely objective point of view, this is amazing. We didn't even know that it was possible. But I don't think," here she gives an odd, strangled laugh. "I don't think we're after the same thing as Pitch."

Sandy shakes his head amiably and pats Jack's knee.

"And speaking of," North adds, clearing his throat, "It is time to make decision about next steps."

"I thought this _was _the next step," Bunny replies. "Bunk down here to hide as best we can. See who comes for us first, Pitch or help. Is there another option?"

"If we can reach out to a village again…" North begins doubtfully.

"I think," Jack begins, and then he falls silent, fumbling over his words. An idea had begun to take hold when he'd first reached Pitch's facility, when he'd begun to remember how familiar it all was, the layout, the shipyard, the techs. "I think I have a completely insane idea," he admits, almost apologetically.

"We've got nowhere else to be, mate," Bunny replies, gesturing at the darkened room.

The pilot nods slowly. "Did you see the kids?"

"Kids?" North parrots.

"I didn't think so. They were pretty much inside by the time you got there, but Pitch's got them. The missing kids from the leprechaun village, and others. Some from my home planet. I know what's going to happen to them, and I know that no one really makes it out of there once they walk into it. Pitch will target their worst fears—he says that's what really _makes _the mods—and he'll feed them to the kids, over and over and over again, the same nightmares every day. And he'll do it until they give out."

A silence passes. The others are unusually tense now, all of them staring, and Jack knows it's because having confirmation of Pitch's activities, of the fact that they're still happening_,_ is almost unbelievable. Sandy offers up a simplified question that even Jack can understand, his sand glimmering faintly in the air: _What do you want to do?_

"I want to smuggle them out of there. I know we're not in such great shape ourselves, but if we leave and come back…it might be too late for a lot of them. Maybe all of them. I think we need to get them out of here and find a way off-planet on one of Pitch's ships."

Bunny gives a low whistle. "Now that you've said it, I'll second it. That's insane."

"If we go to Pitch's lab and we _don't _escape…" Tooth leaves the rest of the statement hanging, but Jack is sure that their imaginations fill in the rest of it.

"Worse still," North adds, "all we have worked for—especially you, Tooth—will go to waste if we do not make it off-planet. Ideas to make mods, to use them for healing and helping…Pitch will continue his work. No one will know he is doing so."

"But healing and helping—isn't that the entire focus of our mission? Isn't that why we're here? Is it even _possible _for us to walk away now, knowing about the kids?" Tooth asks.

Sandy pipes up then, an array of shapes wheeling above his head too fast for Jack to catch. The conversation is…not _private, _exactly, but more _personal, _a decision made between a group with the benefit of longtime trust and friendship. Jack, hugging his knees, waits for them to come to a decision.

"We're not soldiers," Bunny replies, his tone of voice indicating agreement with whatever Sandy has said, "but we're not exactly ordinary civilians either. We can fight. We've all had motive to in the past."

Before Jack has time to wonder about this, North jumps in. "Yet there are very few of us, and we do not know much about Pitch, his facility, his soldiers."

"I can help there," Jack interjects before he has time to think about it. For a second, he has the strange worry that he's broken into their conversation, that it's not a space meant for him, but their gazes flow to him smoothly and without question. "I know the layout; I can draw it up for you. I'm not sure about the number of soldiers or horse-things he has _now, _but I can tell you their stations as best I can from memory."

Bunny gives a nod. "Insider knowledge. That'll help."

A whirl of symbols from Sandy, one that ends with _just in case. _

"If we can get to any sort of communications area, it'll help to send out a message warning about Pitch," Tooth agrees. "You're right. Not to be morbid, but someone should know if we don't make it back."

"We are decided, then?" North asks. The group has turned to Tooth, and though he feels a part of him has known it the whole time, Jack realizes that this is very much Tooth's show. Her interests have led them here, and while North may be the official captain of the ship—and maybe the unofficial leader of the group—they have been tuned to Tooth's dreams of genetic mods the entire time.

"I think it's less a matter of _can we beat Pitch _and more of a matter of _can we really leave those kids behind?" _Tooth says.

"Alright," North replies, drawing himself up with an air of finality, a captain who has finally charted the course on a map. "Let's do it.

.

In his mind, Jack imagines it before it happens: a thin razor blade of a line, hard and slick, stretching out across the barren ground before him toward the edge of the building and cracking up the wall. Someone shifts anxiously behind him—Bunny or Tooth, probably, given the soft rustle of feathers or fur—but Jack hears the slight noise as though through deep water and from far away, its volume and significance muted by his focus on the task at hand.

From his fingers, which are pressed against the rocky crust of the planet, springs a nimble line of ice, its sheen powder blue as it stretches across the ground like a steady flow of water. The more distant it becomes, the harder Jack has to push it, but he manages to press it up the side of the laboratory while it twists and turns like a willful animal all the way to the base of the camera. The pilot thickens it around the camera's base and sides, once, twice, three times to be safe, but he leaves the lens alone.

When he finishes, Jack reminds himself to relax, pointedly easing the tautness that has accumulated in his legs and arms. Exhaling slowly, he turns to face the others.

"He'll realize there's something wrong with the camera eventually once someone tries to change its direction. But for now, we can get in without being seen as long as we stay toward the wall and out of its line of sight."

The others are openmouthed, still torn between staring at the ice in wonderment and scrutinizing Jack. "We've sort of seen you do it before, but…_wow,_" Bunny says when no one else speaks. "That comes in handy, Frostbite."

"You're welcome," Jack replies, smiling.

They are crouched behind a rocky outcropping about forty yards away from the edge of the building. Dusk has fallen in the time it has taken them to reach the lab on foot, and swirls of stars are slowly beginning to fade into focus.

"Ready?" North asks. Jack and Sandy exchange a glance and nod, moving silently from behind their cover and out into the open. It has been decided that the pair of them is the best bet for getting the Guardians inside. Sandy will have to hack the structure to open the door, and Jack will be the necessary partner and lookout, selected by merit of his ability to regulate his own body temperature. Sensors at all of the doors feed thermal readings to Pitch's security team, meaning that none of the others will be able to approach the door without triggering a response. Jack's low body temperature and Sandy's—well, being made of sand—mean that they're the only pair for the job.

As they cross the barren, rocky ground, Jack feels oddly exposed. A twitch of the camera or a whirr of the door will mean a speedy end to everything, and it's not until they reach the deepening shade of the far wall that he breathes more easily. With no windows to watch for—Pitch doesn't seem to believe in letting in natural sunlight—their job is much easier.

At the side of the entrance is a narrow touchscreen panel, obviously meant for a code or scan of some sort. Jack crouches at Sandy's back while the comet does his thing, fighting back his curiosity about Sandy's actions to focus on surveying their surroundings: the last thing they need is for one of Pitch's pets to creep up on them unannounced. Still, the chances of anyone spotting them are relatively slim. This side door is meant as an emergency exit, one that provides access to the warehouse across the way should anything happen to the underground access tunnels. The entrance sits all the way to one side of the building, its creases artfully designed to blend into the rest of the wall, making it difficult to find unless you know where it is.

Besides, they've timed their break-in carefully. Though Jack expects that no one will be around this part of the building—there's nothing important to guard here—they've come at the time when the Collectors will be changing shifts, an added element of distraction. Just in case. The sun recedes slowly behind the horizon in the minutes that it takes Sandy to work out the programming. The pilot stiffens suddenly as the door whirrs open behind them; the bright fluorescent glow of the overhead lights falls across the gleaming ice.

It's as good a signal as any. The others hurry forward, dark shapes silhouetted by the last dying embers of the sun. Sandy closes the door behind them as they pant in the stagnant air.

They step across worn and broken tile as they hurry down the hallway; the building's walls have faded from their original eye-bruising white to a dingy grey, complete with flecks of plaster scattered across the floor and crumbling from the ceiling. Jack thinks that Pitch must have decided to concentrate on the aspects of the facility deemed important—and without attention from sponsors and news outlets, aesthetics clearly isn't one of them.

Further down, the hall splits off to the left. North, Tooth, and Bunny, their faces determined, pause at this junction, turning to Sandy and Jack with grave expressions on their faces. "Good luck, then." Tooth whispers, and the three of them turn away, loping silently toward the main branch of the facility.

It has been decided that Sandy and Jack will be in charge of finding and moving the children while the others act as a distraction. As Jack watches their retreating backs, he wonders again whether this plan is bad enough to be considered suicidal. "Don't worry about us!" North had told Jack in his jubilant, booming voice when the pilot had worried that Pitch's guards and horses would be too overpowering for them. "We've had our share of past lives too, Jack."

Sandy nudges him with his elbow, the expression on his face making his meaning obvious. _Ready?_

"Yeah," Jack replies. "Let's go."

The pilot leads the way, his feet taking him toward the prisoners' barracks with little involvement from his mental faculties, which are expanded outward, his natural human senses reaching for any strange noises or movements and his unnatural given senses stretched out to perceive temperatures. This sector of the facility is meant mostly for storage, with a few tech labs scattered throughout. Though most of the rooms they pass are empty, Jack tenses every now and then when they pass an area with warm clusters of what must be guards inside, only allowing himself to breathe when they've left it behind.

The further they get inside, the more Jack begins to feel the shadow of Pitch looming before them, his presence somehow undeniable and unmistakable, nothing Jack can sense with his powers but a tangible fact all the same. They are creeping toward the corner leading to the chem labs when his distraction gets the better of him.

Two guards lumber around the corner, looking as all of Pitch's brainwashed Collectors do: sallow-skinned and grim, with an exhausted slump to their beefy shoulders. For a moment, all of them freeze in surprise, and the men's eyes expand almost comically.

"You—!" one of them begins, but that's all they manage: before Jack can even react, two lashes of shimmering gold whip from behind him, looping around the guards' legs to pull their feet out from under them. Jack whirls around to see Sandy, his face defiant and bright. On feeling Jack's gaze, the comet turns to him, nodding his head pointedly to the pair of guards who lie groaning on the floor.

Obediently, Jack moves forward to concentrate his senses as he touches first one guard, then the other, his ice slowly creeping across them in solid blocks to bind them to the floor. He can hear their teeth chattering already. He turns back to Sandy, who raises one eyebrow. _Good team, _Jack makes out from the comet's flurry of symbols.

The pilot grins, but the moment is short-lived. A shrill scream of an alarm blares overhead; Jack claps his hands to his ears, looking around the corner for the set of guards he thinks must be coming. For a horrible moment, he thinks that they weren't able to incapacitate the two Collectors quickly enough, that one of the guards managed to signal for help somehow. But then he realizes that the plan is working the way it is meant to: the others are distracting Pitch and the guards. Possibly, they're doing too good of a job at it.

"C'mon, let's go," he says to Sandy, leaping over one of the guards.

The prisoners' barracks are not much farther away. Jack had expected there to be Collectors stationed in thick clusters as they approached. As far as he can remember, there were always guards stationed within spitting distance of the barracks' entrance, but this area of the building is empty, almost eerily so. A twinge of worry passes through his mind at the thought of the other Guardians fighting nearly all of the guards in the facility, but he quashes the thought. There's no time for it.

At the door is another touchscreen. Jack wordlessly steps aside, his back to Sandy as he scans the hall for movement and thermal readings. After a few moments and with a soft whirr, the door slides open, and Jack turns to find the barracks bathed in darkness.

"Where…?" he wonders aloud, but before he can finish, he realizes that the room isn't empty. It's peppered with the warmth of hundreds of bodies. As his eyes adjust to the darkness, he can make out the wide and catlike eyes of the children, all of them wide awake and huddled together for warmth or comfort.

Over the screech of the alarm, Jack hears a voice call his name. "Jack? Is that you?" Out of the darkness at his side, Jamie appears, his sister at his heels. Both of them are dressed in stiff blue hospital garb, pants and a shirt that hang from their small frames, and both wear identical looks of panic. "What's going on?"

"We're leaving, that's what," Jack says shortly, squeezing Jamie's shoulder. Then, louder: "We need to move all of you out of here right away. Nothing is going to hurt you, but we have to move quickly and with _no noise. _Put on your shoes and clothes."

In any other situation, Jack imagines that he might have been met with questions. Whether the blare of the alarm has driven them into a panic or Pitch has already shown them what happens to children who ask too many questions, they scramble to work as soon as the pilot has finished talking.

Sandy, gleaming dimly in the darkness, seems to have a calming effect on the children. He glides back and forth, urging them onward with as much patience as possible. For his part, Jack can only stand grimly at the door, every nerve in his body thrumming with impatience and fear. He hates this room, hates the beds, hates feeling packed away into such a small space. Between Sandy's worried expression and the tension rolling from Jack, the children seem to sense the urgency of the situation; it's the quietest group of kids Jack has ever seen. Were it not for the rustle of clothing and the slight whine of bedsprings, he can almost imagine the room to be empty.

Jamie breaks the silence. "We only have shoes," he whispers. His boots are on his feet already, and he crouches on the floor nearby to help his sister lace up hers. "They took all our clothes. Even our coats. They took our bags and everything—" Here he stops, his voice warbling. "Are we going to get that back?"

His eyes are somber as he looks up at Jack, and the pilot thinks that he already knows the answer to his question. Jack shakes his head.

"They gave us this black stuff—and it made me feel…" Jamie trails off, shivering.

"Black sand," Jack says.

"I was really scared," Jamie says in a small voice. "This place isn't what I thought it was going to be."

Jack frowns. "Hey. It's alright. We're getting you out of here."

"This isn't an evacuation?" For the first time, Jack notices the wary way Jamie holds himself slightly apart from Jack. _Of course, _he realizes. _Guilt by association. _Seeing Jack with Pitch earlier would make it seem as though the pair of them are working together.

"No. I mean, yes, but—we're not working with Pitch. We're working _against_ him."

"Pitch is mean," Sophie says suddenly. Her eyes are watery, gleaming in the fluorescent light brimming from the hallway, and then she is crying. Jack shifts uneasily.

"Yeah, he is. That's why we're getting you out. Don't be afraid, okay?"

But this is an impossible thing to ask of them. As Jack looks around at the children, some of them sobbing into their shirtsleeves or listening glumly to his words or fighting their shoes on in frustration, he realizes that they've already had a taste of Pitch's medicine. The fear will be hard to get rid of.

But they'll have to try. "Look," Jack says suddenly, raising his voice as much as he dares. "We're gonna play a game, okay? It's…it's a game, and here's how it works." He rips the white, starched blanket from the nearest bed and wraps it around Sophie as best he can so that it doesn't impede the movement of her legs. _It'll keep her warm_, he thinks, _and the color means an extra second of blending into the walls if we're spotted._ "Blankets are protection, okay? Everyone take a blanket and wrap as much of you as you can, like ghosts. We're going to move fast, and it's a little like hide and seek—don't let anyone see you or hear you, and we're all going to stick together. Our goal is to get onto the ship. We do that, and we win the prize. We do that, and you'll get all the snacks and junk food you want on the next planet we land on, okay?"

Slow, quiet nods and another flurry of movement. The kids bundle each other up as best they can, though Jack is careful to have them keep their legs free as possible. After a minute, they drift nearer to press against Jack at the door, a small army of ghosts.

Sandy heads back toward him. _Ready?_

"Ready."

The next part of the plan relies primarily on the assumptions that the others will keep the Collectors and Pitch busy and that any Collectors who spot them won't harm the children, who are essential to the facility's operations. Sandy and Jack herd the children toward the shipyard at a slow jog, Jack leading the way and Sandy at the rear. The children are as quiet as they can be, but the slight scuffs of boots and rustle of blankets from over fifty people sound loud to Jack's ears.

He almost doesn't notice Jamie and Sophie hovering just behind him until Sophie puts her hand in his. He looks down at her, at her matted hair and grim, tearstained face, and he presses forward more quickly.

The route to the hangar is mostly clear. Jack glances behind him every so often to see the frightened faces of the long line of children behind him, but thanks to his ability to sense heat, he can guide them away from any major nuisances. He has to redirect them twice, taking them down side paths to avoid the warmth of moving Collectors or, once, what sounds like the whinny of a horse. The horses, Jack thinks, are probably far fewer than in number than human guards, and Pitch will have stationed them in only the most important sections of the facility, although there's no telling what they've been trained—programmed?—to do in the case of an emergency.

Once, Jack senses a guard's approach before he can redirect them, and he covers the ground in ice to make the guard slip and crack his head hard against the floor, where he lies still. At the rear, Sandy has to throw two guards against the wall to knock them out. The children take this in with wide eyes, their silence unbroken.

_Almost there, _Jack begins to recite to himself. _Almost there. _Sandy will hack the shipyard's system to allow them access, and Jack will arm the ship and keep out any unwanted Collectors until the Guardians can fight their way onboard.

But it's not so simple. From inside the narrow tunnels of the main laboratories, they are suddenly swallowed into a gaping storage bay broken by lines of metal shelving that stretch two stories above their heads, the screaming alarm fading away as they enter the wide and silent room. Jack falters just after they cross the threshold, feeling the warm press of the children at his back. The storage bay must stretch at least sixty yards to either side, at least, and somewhere at the opposite end of the bay is the door to the hangar, but the maze of shelves and wooden boxes will make it difficult to get there unnoticed if the room is being guarded. Even now, the polished concrete floor does nothing to muffle the sound of the children's footsteps, which echo thinly in the open air of the room.

Sophie's hand grips his more tightly. She is peering toward a stack of boxes to their left. Through the gaps in the shelving, Jack can just make out the rustle of movement. A Collector, by the height.

Sandy is already moving to take care of it. Jack bends down to whisper to her, and the children closest lean in to hear. "It's alright," he says. "No one here will hurt you. They'll attack _us_—me and Sandy—because we're not supposed to be here. But Pitch wants you here, and he won't hurt a child." _Not when he needs all of you so badly, _Jack thinks.

Sophie nods solemnly, though she doesn't loosen her grip. She has drawn Jamie in to hold his hand as well, and Jack can see that the boy's skin is white in her clutches.

A minute later, Sandy returns, and they begin moving the children into the heart of the room. They strain for the sounds of footsteps or the flash of movement amid the gleaming black bars of the shelving units, Jack all the while leading them in the general direction of the far wall. They pause twice when the presence of a Collector becomes apparent, once when a boy's whisper alerts them to signs of movement, and once when a Collector stumbles across them from behind, leaving Sandy to slap him aside with his whip so Jack can freeze him to a metal box.

The warmth of multiple bodies flows from an area to their right, and Sandy waits with children while Jack clambers slowly up the shelving and through the claustrophobic spaces between the boxes to find a team of three Collectors grunting as they unload wiring and hardware components from a box. Leaning out only slightly over their heads, he touches his fingers to the railing at his feet, and ice streaks from his fingertips and down the metal, shimmering across the floor to creep up their boots. Before they can shout in alarm, Jack's ice shoots up their clothes to cover their mouths, binding their limbs tightly to their sides.

Jack crawls back through the boxes to leap down to the cement floor. "Almost there," he whispers. "Come on!" From here, they can see the top of the huge hangar door begin to rise above the shelving, the bright floodlights from the hangar spilling out into the storage bay. The children, sensing that they are nearing their goal, scurry behind him with more fervor than before, their faces growing wide and hopeful.

The alarm screams to life overhead. "Time to go!" Jack cries, leading them into a full-on jog. Still, no one blocks their way, and the pilot looks back to find Sandy ushering the children onward, his expression as frantic as Jack's must be.

A crash resonates from somewhere behind them, and then the sound of shouting. Jack thinks he recognizes North's pained cry echo from somewhere in the distance and the bark of Collectors yelling orders, but they've almost reached the door.

And then Pitch spills from behind a stack of crates, his sudden appearance slipping a dagger of fear into Jack's chest. He rides one of the Nightmares, his black robes billowing behind him to create the appearance of some demonic rider on his hellish steed. The robotic creature slows its movement the man's slightest gesture. Pitch's glowing amber eyes fall upon Jack, and a snarl opens across his face.

Jack has barely had time to recognize the presence of the other Nightmares, a few at either side of Pitch, before one of them is upon him, teeth sinking into his shoulder as it drags him bodily to the ground. The pilot is so surprised at the sudden movement, at the way that all of the air wheezes out of him at once, that he doesn't even have the time to cry out in pain, but the children do it for him. Shrieks and thin screams meet his ears, pattering footsteps race away, and Jack can even hear the slice of Sandy's whips through the air as he fights off the other creatures. Eyes watering in pain, the pilot kicks out at the one biting down on him, but the movement doesn't seem to damage its thick hide.

"_You—_how _dare _you—" Pitch screeches, and as far as Jack knows, he's made no move to chase the children. He has eyes only for the pilot. "I _made _you! If you think you'll abandon me now—" Spit flies from his mouth, and he takes a moment to school his raging expression into something calmer but no less threatening. "We still have work to do, you and I. Though your part might be a bit more painful now," he notes, a razor blade of a smile slithering across his face as Jack cries out against the tight press of the Nightmare's jaw.

The creature begins to drag him across the ground, its pull seeming to yank the very flesh of Jack's shoulder from his bones. He grapples with its head, gasping and clinging as best he can to relieve some of the pressure. Pitch brings his own steed to a trot at their side, but the fire spilling across Jack's shoulder makes it hard to concentrate on him. Distantly, he is aware of the presence of the Guardians nearby; Tooth is even near enough for him to make out the glint of her feathers as she gracefully dodges the laser gun fire of a Collector.

Jack squirms, the horse's bite still ripping at his skin. His frost spills onto the ground almost unconsciously, but to no advantage. Pitch smiles down at him as he struggles. "I think we can put our differences behind us. The important thing is you're back. And now I'm onto all your little tricks, so there's nothing to stop us from testing for the rest of your life. After all, we've got a lot to do, and only sixty more years to do it. More or less. I don't have the actuarial tables in front of me…"

Jack hazily recognizes that Pitch is insane—he _must _be—and wonders again how the man managed to put all this together on his own, to rebuild the factory and fly under the radar even with more daring abductions, all with an obviously addled brain. "Jack!" A voice cries shrilly, and before Jack can hazily connect the voice to the speaker, something hard cracks into the side of Pitch's face, sending him tumbling from the horse. He lands with a sharp thud on the other side of the Nightmare, the thing that had hit him rolling away—a piece of machinery, its wires jutting out.

As best he can, Jack turns his head to see the source of the attack, and his eyes fall upon Jamie. The boy has opened one of the wooden crates to dig through its contents, and as Jack watches, he throws another piece of metal toward the inventor as though he's playing some schoolyard game, his eyes teary but determined. "Leave Jack alone!" he cries.

From his position on the ground, Pitch looks meaningfully at his steed before slowly picking himself up to dust off his clothes. The horse and several of its brothers gallop toward the child, and Jack nearly wrenches his shoulder from the Nightmare's grasp in horror. "Jamie, run!"

Jamie turns to disappear into the maze of boxes, the horses right on his heels, and Jack can't see much at all. Pitch moves deeper into the storage bay and toward the lab, the Nightmare dragging Jack along as well, until the sound of Jamie's screams reach his ears.

Ice leaps out of him as though of its own accord, spilling across the floor so swiftly that Pitch and the horse have little time to react before they slip awkwardly across it, the Nightmare finally releasing Jack's shoulder as it slams hard to the ground. Ignoring the mounting pain, Jack clambers to his feet to sprint in his friend's direction, his footsteps sure against the frozen ground. Jack's ice stretches uncontrollably across the floor around him, creeping up the shelving units as if to aid in his search. "Jamie! Jamie, where are you?"

"Over here!" The weak voice comes from his left, and he ducks to squeeze through the crates on the lower level of the shelving unit.

The first thing he sees are the Nightmares, which circle a stack of boxes perched near the next series of shelves. As he watches, one of them rears on its hind legs to ram its steely front hooves into the wood. Jamie screeches in fear from behind it.

Ordinarily, Jack might have had to will his frost to obey, but it's never really left him this time. He can feel a strange power coursing through him, thrumming at his fingertips as if simply waiting for an outlet. He feels _cold. _

He leaps out from behind the boxes, and thick, rippling ice cracks from his place on the floor to stretch toward the horses, working their way over the hooves and up their hide so thickly that, regulators or not, it will take them some time to escape. Still, the ice continues to flow, thickening and rising, bleeding out of Jack uncontrollably, freezing him in place. He can feel it building across every surface, bubbling to life around him, and then Jamie creeps out from behind the boxes, relaxed by the silence. "Jack—you…did you do that?"

Jack can't find enough voice to answer; he's lost somewhere in the ice, which builds and builds across the steeds until they are trapped in a thick, icy mound. "Jack, are you okay?"

Jamie is so close now, and Jack has enough presence of mind to murmur "_Don't…_" But then, the boy is already hugging him, flinging his arms around Jack's waist, and fear shoots into Jack's heart. He can feel Jamie's warmth at his side, can even feel the hot blood in his veins, and he expects the cold to spill onto Jamie as it always does when the uncontrollable deluge flows out of Jack.

But nothing happens. Jack slowly reins the ice back in, Jamie's warmth at his side melting something inside of him. He hugs his friend back. "Are you okay?"

"I'm okay."

"This is _touching,_" Pitch drawls from behind them. Jack and Jamie spin around to find him leaning against a Nightmare, his face a mixture of irritation and amusement. "You've found a little _pet. _It's alright, Jack—you can bring him with you."

Rage blinks to life in Jack more quickly than he's ever known; he's empty of it one second, and in the next, it fills him completely. He thinks some of it must be spilling into his face, into the hardness of his jaw, into his eyes, which must gleam like chips of ice—because Pitch takes a step back, confused.

Without so much as a warning, without taking the time to push it across the floor to him, Jack pulls his ice out of the ground at Pitch's feet, letting it climb onto him slowly with icy, tendril-like fingers. The inventor swears and screams violently as it thickens, creeping up his knees and legs.

"You remember this part, don't you?" Jack asks coldly as it sweeps over his chest, and Pitch meets his eyes in fury. He opens his mouth to screech something, but Jack stuffs his ice inside of that too, pulling it right over Pitch's head. For good measure, he quickly freezes the horse as well, combining the two of them into a giant pillar of ice. He expands and shapes it until stretches yards to either side, taking the shelving units with it, and almost reaches to the high ceiling above. With its thermal regulators, perhaps the horse will eventually be able to worm its way out, taking Pitch with it, but the thick ice will require hours to melt.

"Whoa," says Jamie. Jack looks down at him, having half forgotten his presence except that his arm is still wrapped around the boy's shoulders to pull him tightly to his side. "That was _amazing._"

Not the fearful words Jack might have expected. The pilot swallows, nodding his head. "Let's get the hell out of here, Jamie."

They rush back toward the open hangar door, following the sounds of fighting, and spill out into a war zone. In bursts of color against the black uniforms of the Collectors and the Nightmares, the Guardians fight in spurts, expertly taking on the masses of Pitch's guards, who seem to have all gathered here in one place. Jack pulls Jamie back roughly by the collar of his shirt as a Nightmare stampedes past them. They retreat to the side of a shelving unit where the pair of them is less likely to be noticed.

"Where are the others?" Jamie asks, worry lacing his voice. "Where's Sophie?"

"I don't know—which way did they run? Did you see?"

Jamie shakes his head. "I'm not sure. I just looked back and they were gone."

In the distance, North wields his swords as though they are extensions of his arms, spinning and dodging with more fluidity than Jack might have expected from someone his size. The blades—which the pilot has never examined up close—must not be an ordinary metal, as they slice through the sturdy hides of the Nightmares with almost no effort. A loud crash at their backs makes them both jump; through the gaps between the crates, Jack can make out a Collector sinking limply to the floor, revealing Bunny's face. The Pooka looks surprised. "Get the kids to a ship, Jack! We'll catch up!"

Before Jack can respond, the overgrown rabbit is already moving to catch his boomerang in one paw, aiming it again to take care of the next target.

"Come on," Jack tells Jamie, and they barrel away from the fighting and toward the door.

Jack can hear the children before he sees them, their uncertain whispers and shuffling footsteps seeming loud in such great numbers, like the rustling of a flock of small birds. He rounds a corner to find them being herded away from the door by a team of Collectors. Some of the younger ones are crying, trying to keep their sobs as quiet as they can, and the older ones hug them in comfort. A few of the oldest, the ones who must be eleven or twelve, hold their weary companions in their arms or on their backs.

One of the Collectors cries out at Jack's appearance, all of them raising their lowered weapons. "Get the door!"

They are close enough to the door that Jack can see the gleaming ships inside the hangar from between a few stacks of boxes; Jack darts aside quickly, pulling Jamie under the cover of a large crate just as the firing begins. To the side of the threshold is a control panel similar to the one he'd seen Sandy unlock outside, and amid the backdrop of screaming children, one of the Collectors rushes forward to punch a code into the panel. With the threat of danger pressing in at him, Jack easily pulls his power to life to whip a jet of ice at the man, and to his surprise, it flies through the air as though he'd thrown it. Before Jack has time to wonder at _that _new talent, he realizes that the action was just a split second too late—the man had enough time to enter the code, and the door is slowly beginning to close from above.

Quickly, Jack peers over the top of the crate, and with three sharp cracks, the Collectors are cemented in place, frozen from boots to neck. Jack gestures to Jamie to follow as he steps out from behind the crate to rush to the kids. Their faces clear into expressions of mingling worry and hope as Jack appears, and Jamie runs forward to catch Sophie as she leaps toward him. "Let's move," Jack cries, wading through them to step into the hangar itself before the door can close. They stumble after him, tired and uncertain, and he turns as he crosses the threshold to pull them through. Their number seems impossibly large, Jack fearing all the while that they won't make it in time, but the last few of them barely need to duck to cross into the hangar. Panting wildly, they stare at the door as it slowly crawls down the last few inches, sealing itself with a whirring sound.

_That's not part of the plan, _Jack thinks fretfully.

"Are your friends coming with us?" Jamie asks, looking up at him.

"Maybe," he replies, turning away from the door.

It's brighter inside, a series of sheer white lights that miss nothing and, in their coordinated spacing, cast only thin shadows. Out of the dim warehouse, Jack feels a bit safer, and safer still once his eyes fall upon the towering contents of the room.

Neat lines of spacecrafts are settled into long rows across the polished floor, and the diversity makes something in his chest swell, his fingers itching for the controls. A handful of _Cespare _class ships, a hulking set of warship Orbas, a few lean Rosalia models, and a transport Nepheris. A military ship. Older models rust around the walls of the room, with the newer, popular models toward the center. And then smaller, family-type ships like the Caligue, some of them damaged. Jack has the sudden, sinking feeling that these ships weren't acquired by legal means—Pitch must have gathered them over time, maybe as people have stumbled across his labs.

"Jack?" someone says uncertainly, and Jack realizes that he's been standing there for a minute, deciding. Jamie is still resolutely at his side, the other children muttering fearfully amongst themselves, torn between watching Jack and staring around the room in amazement.

"Are we going to go?" one of the water nymph girls asks, her silver eyes pinned upon him.

As if by some secret signal, a deluge of words races from the other children as well.

"How are we going to get out of here?"

"None of us can fly! What are we going to do?"

"Did you _see _what they were doing back there? They had _swords!_"

"I want to go home!"

"One of them can make one of the guards fly us, maybe…"

"_I'm _flying us out of here," Jack says suddenly, silencing them as he continues to visually inspect the ships. As he does so, he sees more and more signs of damage and wear and tear. "And if it runs, we're taking that ship," he adds after a moment, pointing at a Rosalia-8773.

The Rosalia line has no real defenses to speak of aside from a shield, and it possesses no artillery whatsoever, but Jack hopes they won't need defenses right away, not with the condition in which they're leaving Pitch's lab and its inhabitants. A Rosalia is ideal for its speed; it's one of the fastest ships in the galaxy, its bodywork being a cousin to the_ Guardian_'s_. _What's more_, _the ship appears to be in the best condition of many of the other ships, aside from a few of the Orbas and one or two of the huge Collector ships that line the far wall. But the larger ships would require multiple pilots and a larger crew, and he's not sure that the Guardians have the skills to help him man it on such short notice without his teaching them.

Not that he means to _leave _the planet on a defenseless ship, which would be risky for such a long journey. It looks like they won't be abandoning the_ Guardian _here after all. The Rosalia should be a good match for the parts they need, having almost identical thrusters and reactor cores.

The children follow him toward the ship, still murmuring worriedly amongst themselves, and when Jack finally has the presence of mind to realize that the little water nymph girl is crying, he turns to her.

"It's all right," he laughs, not daring to slow as he reaches down to squeeze her shoulder. "The hard part is over with now. The rest of this is going to be like a school field trip—we'll find a way to get you home, wherever your home is." He feels a momentary pang of uncertainty at the word _we, _but he doesn't show it.

"Are you sure?"

Jack gives her the kind of smile he always gave Mags when she worried: open, genuine, warm. "You can count on it."

The statement doesn't seem to brush away all of their fears—Pitch has done too good a job with them—but their steps are a little lighter as they climb up the ramp and onto the ship. "Spread out and get comfortable," Jack says. "We're not going to be on this ship for long—we'll be making repairs to another ship. Kitchen's going to be to your left, and you can camp out anywhere you want for now."

They flurry into activity, excitement taking over, and Jack turns to clamber up the stairs to the cockpit. He'd expected Pitch to be too arrogant to have a security lock on the mainframe, but he's surprised to find himself locked out. No matter: while other kinds of hacking aren't the pilot's strong suit, he knows his way around ships. It takes him under a minute to get access to the shipboard systems, and soon enough, the entire craft is thrumming as the engines warm as Jack prepares it for flight.

The curved windshield faces the sealed hangar door, and Jack glances up at it every so often, simultaneously aware of the exuberant shouts of the children and the lack of movement from the direction of the hangar door in the distance.

"Jack?"

The pilot turns to find Jamie standing at the threshold of the cockpit. He looks around in wonder, leaning in as though afraid to step inside or touch anything. Sophie pushes in from behind him carelessly, dropping into the seat next to Jack. "This is _really cool,_" Jamie continues, grinning. "But—are we leaving? Aren't your friends coming?"

_Your friends. _It's the second time someone has called them that, but Jack's not sure he can consider the term valid.

For friendship, there has to be trust, and Jack has been considering jettisoning the Guardians entirely for the last few minutes. They know too much about him, more than he's ever let anyone know. (_Anyone alive, _he reminds himself bitterly.) And he has the kids to think about, their safety to consider—and haven't they been the whole point of this venture? Jack has long lived by the rule _everyone for themselves, _and it's served him well enough. He follows it automatically most of the time and has done so for years, except that now he can't seem to drag his eyes away from the door, waiting for any signs of life.

Jack swears, and Sophie perks up in amusement. "Sorry," he says to her. "You're right. They're coming with us." Without explaining, he darts past Jamie and down the stairs, cursing himself for a fool.

He's sprinting past the _Cespare _raider when he hears his name again and whirls around to see Jamie. "Wait up!" the boy cries.

"Go back to the ship, Jamie," he says, slowing to a jog to allow the boy to catch up on his shorter legs. Jamie shakes his head. "Where's Sophie?"

Jamie looks at Jack as though he's an idiot. "I made her stay in her seat. I told her someone had to guard the ship."

"Good—but you _have _to stop following me. You're going to get yourself killed."

"So are you," Jamie says pointedly, matching Jack stride for stride. "I helped last time."

"That's…probably fair." And besides, Jack wouldn't mind the company on his descent into madness. "Well, come on."

They come to a stop at the foot of the hangar door, and without the echo of their pattering footsteps, the room sinks into a heavy silence broken only by the thrum of the air and life support systems. _If_ _there's anything at on the other side of that door_, Jack thinks, _I can't hear it at all._

"Did the fighting stop?" Jamie asks, suddenly whispering and looking surprised at the volume of his own voice. Louder, he says, "Or maybe it's just we can't hear it."

Jack shakes his head, pressing one hand to the metal of the door, allowing his consciousness to drift out from him in the recognition of heat patterns. Jamie is a warm, glowing beacon at his side, and the warming engine of the Rosalia is ablaze at his back. Across the door, it is cooler in general, the cold familiar and comforting because it is his own. His frost stretches throughout the area like a spiderweb, its lines intertwining and periodically broken by the faint, muffled warmth of icily cocooned guards and, somewhere, the trapped ire of Pitch Black.

The cold is so thick a presence that it takes him a moment to perceive the radiating warmth near the door, the combined heat of several bodies. He blinks a few times, letting his powers fall away like one coming out of a deep sleep, and he pounds on the door, deciding to risk a shout. "Guys? Is that you?"

For a moment, there's nothing, and then Jack can make out the faint garble of a voice, though no words in particular. There's a returning knock. Jamie presses his ear against the thick metal door. "There are people talking on the other side," he says.

Jack presses his ear to the metal as well, and this close to the door, he can distinctly make out Tooth's worried tone. "Jack! Are you alright?"

"We're fine," Jack shouts back, clapping a hand over his other ear to hear as well as he can. "The kids are on the ship. What do we do about the door? Can't Sandy get it open?"

North's voice, deep and resounding, is much easier to hear. "Yes, Sandy _could…_but on this side, control panel is frozen. Bunny is searching room for another that can access door, but no luck."

_Oh, right. _Jack had frozen the guard who had shut the door in the first place, and the entire station must be completely iced over now. "What do we do?"

"You have panel on your side, yes?"

Jamie and Jack blink at each other and pull their ears from the door to look around. The hangar door must be at least fifty feet long, but neither side has the wall panel with glowing buttons Jack had seen on the other side. "I don't think so."

"Jack, what about that?" Jamie murmurs, pointing away from the door. A small, circular hub rises from out of the cement floor a few feet away, coming just higher than Jack's waist. He jogs over to find that it is some sort of control terminal, a touchscreen with detailed maps of the facility and a few thumbnail video feeds, but a message pops up on the screen the instant Jack tries to navigate the menu: _Key? _An onscreen keyboard appears to give him a place to enter a code.

He steps back to the door. "There's no panel, but there's a control terminal." He shouts. "I might be able to open the door from there, but I don't have the password."

The voices on the other side are muffled, the Guardians seeming to be deciding something amongst themselves. Jack shuffles restlessly from foot to foot as Jamie glances back toward the Rosalia, and the pilot hopes that at the very least, the kids aren't tearing apart the inside of the ship.

"Jack?" North shouts through the door.

"Yeah?"

"Sandy will be giving you crash course in hacking. This one is simple, he says. But you will be needing some way to hear us from terminal."

Jamie looks up at Jack, his face a triumphant _I-told-you-so_. Jack shoves him, rolling his eyes in amusement. "I've got a buddy here who can translate for me. His name's Jamie; he'll tell me what I need to do. You guys ready?"

The next few minutes are spent playing the most bizarre game of telephone Jack has ever experienced, with Jack relaying to Jamie what he sees on screen and then Jamie shouting the explanation across the door. The process of getting around Pitch's system is slightly more confusing than it should be, with Sandy explaining to North, who explains to Jamie, who shouts to Jack. Since they don't need to bother getting in with subtlety and finesse—it's no secret that they're hacking into the system, and there's no one to shut them out at this point—the process doesn't take particularly long. Finding an open port takes longer than it should, but Sandy eventually helps Jack get access to the memory and account settings, creating a new administrative user override code.

Jack punches the code in, holding his breath, and the door begins to slowly hiss, rising up out of its place like the clanking of a drawbridge. Before it can get up a few feet, Tooth ducks beneath it. "Jack, you're alright! Where are the kids?"

"They're all on the ship," Jack says, enduring her crushing hug as he pats her gingerly on the back. "Is it all clear back there?"

"We had a little trouble toward the end, but we took care of it."

"Glad to see you're in one piece, mate," Bunny says gruffly.

"We're just waiting on you guys."

"And you _did _wait for us," North replies, clapping a hand to Jack's shoulder.

"Yeah, well. Never leave a crewmate behind and all that."

Still, North smiles at him knowingly. Next to him, golden fireworks and confetti sparkle above Sandy's head. _Good job! _he says as he high-fives Jack, moving toward the terminal.

"What are you doing?" Jack asks, curious.

Sandy's grin becomes a bit sharper, and he flings up a series of symbols that Jack can't make out so well, though he understands _payback _and _total lockdown. _

"Wait, hold up," Jamie says as Sandy begins typing away relentlessly at the keypad. The boy is half-hidden from the others behind Jack. "Are you North like…_Nicholas St. North? _And—and Bunny as in _Bunnymund, _and Toothiana, and the Sandman? You guys are—are—?"

"Pleased to meet you!" North booms, holding out his hand, and Jamie, star-struck, shakes it in earnest. "Thank you for helping."

"You're welcome! Jack, you didn't tell me—are you all _friends?_ That's so cool!" He bounces up and down on his heels. There's something endearing about the way Jamie thinks they're all friends, and Jack exchanges a wry grin with North. Maybe they are, after all. _And we won, _he thinks giddily. _We actually did it._

The door begins to close with a loud, steady whirr, and Sandy hops away from the terminal, a delighted little smile on his face. "I don't even want to know what you did," Bunny says in amusement.

In the midst of their banter, something drifts over Jack like a rising tide, a sudden, consuming coldness that makes him straighten in confusion, his spine stiffening. Bunny and North notice the change almost immediately and lean forward in concern. "Jack?"

It feels like a small moon, a frozen stretch of ice settling into the air all at once, and Jack looks up to find that they are being watched. On a catwalk high above, peering through a pair of spectacles with a dull sort of disinterest, is a squat man with frazzled grey hair. As Jack puzzles over the odd, distant expression, the others follow his gaze.

"Manny?" Tooth blurts, her head craned back to see him. "But why are you here?"

The man says nothing, just peers down at them through his thick glasses. Jack has the impression that the corners of his eyes are crinkled in amusement.

"What's a lawyer from the HAB Sector doing out here in the Reaches?" Bunny asks suspiciously, and Jack realizes that he is thumbing the metal of one of his boomerangs.

"Lawyer?" Jack asks, slowly pulling Jamie behind him at the obvious signals of worry and confusion from the Guardians. The moon—or _Manny_—or whoever he is doesn't strike the pilot as a lawyer. In fact, his face seems familiar, and a nebulous memory filters into Jack's thoughts. A round face gleaming with reverent affection, a hand fluttering over the pulse point on his wrist. The strange recollection seeps back into the depths of Jack's mind before he has a chance to grasp it.

"Manny," Tooth begins again, "Why did you—are you _working _with Pitch?" She darts into the air toward him, but he holds up one hand, and she stills instantly, her wings thrumming shimmering as she beats them to stay in place.

For a long moment, the man doesn't respond, only smiles at them faintly. After a pause, he begins to speak, his voice quiet but somehow strong enough to reach their ears even from such a distance. "My work with you was important, but so was my work with Pitch. Both were necessary."

"You _were _working with Pitch," Bunny cries, padding forward so he is almost directly underneath the man. Jack wonders if his powerful, lagomorphic legs can catapult him up onto the catwalk. "What the hell did you do?"

"You're—a doctor, not a lawyer," Jack says suddenly, surprising even himself with the words. The man's faint smile, which he has now turned onto Jack, has ignited the pilot's remembrance of his remarkably brief past with this stranger. "I remember you from the labs. You were there all the time, listening to all of Pitch's rants and never talking. I don't think I heard you say two words, except that after you and Pitch and the others did…well, I remember…I woke up afterwards, not even knowing where I was or _who _I was. You gave me my codename—'Jack Frost.' I think that's the only thing I've ever heard you say."

"You helped with his bloody experiments?" Bunny cries. "You've been doing it this whole time?"

Manny stares. "It was necessary," he repeats. "The four of you needed a little help. And now five of you…" He trails off, his expression becoming benevolent, and then he removes his hands from the bar and takes a step back.

"Who are you really?" Jack asks, but the man doesn't respond. After another long look, he turns his back sweeps away to disappear into the gloom of an open door behind him. North cries out, and Tooth launches herself back up into the air, calling the man's name. Though Bunny and North head for the nearby stairs as Jack and Jamie watch, Tooth cuts them off before they can even climb halfway.

"He's gone," she calls after a minute. "The hall is empty, the rooms are empty, there's nowhere for him to go, but he's gone."

Still, North and Bunny search the immediate area to be sure, and even Sandy eventually drifts up to help. Jack waits downstairs for a verdict he knows is coming, and Jamie waits resolutely at his side, arms crossed over his chest. The Manny Jack is familiar with, a dedicated doctor who had his run of the facility, would have known the area better than anyone. If there's a way to get out in secret, he's probably long gone.

It doesn't explain why Jack's senses suddenly registered him as some cold, floating satellite instead of a living and breathing human, but then again, his powers have only developed since leaving Pitch's lab. Cosmos, he hadn't even known he could throw his ice at someone as he had earlier, so what's to say this isn't some brand new and troubling development?

"How did you know him?" he asks, mostly in order to distract himself, as North and Bunny finally clamber back down the stairs.

"He came to us as lawyer, originally," North explains. "A very long time ago, before we knew each other well, so he came to us separately. He gave us the idea of working together, for legal reasons, he said, and to help reach some goals. He thought it would be best to join parts of our companies. We have not spoken to him in several years, nor have we seen him."

"What did he mean, we needed a fifth member?" Bunny interrupts, looking suspiciously at the catwalk.

"It is obvious," says North. "Jack is Guardian now, and he is helping us. We have already done much and learned much since we are meeting him!" He claps a hand on Jack's shoulder, but he, too, still gazes up at the catwalk as if daring Manny to reappear.

"So you're saying he was helping? Because working with Pitch isn't my idea of helpful," Jack says dryly. "And—wait—" the pilot pauses, remembering something. The others turn to him. "Wait, what if…well, I only found out about this job because of a message I got on my holo-comm. The sender was encrypted. If he was _trying _to get me to be the fifth member of your little club, do you think…?"

Tooth frowns, looking troubled, as a fairly exact representation of a holo-comm sprouts above Sandy's head. It's followed by a question mark.

Obediently, Jack pulls the device, which has been useless without access to the Net, from his pocket and navigates to the message. He offers the holo-comm to Sandy, whose fingers fly across the clear screen. After a moment, the inventor lets out a string of symbols too fast for Jack to understand completely, though he thinks he gets the gist.

"It's hard to say _who _it came from, but it definitely came from here on this planet," Tooth translates.

"Okay," Jack says slowly, feeling oddly vulnerable as he takes the device back from Sandy. "But it's just weird…it's almost like he coordinated it, you know? Like designing a group. It's weird that…"

"It's weird not to know his motives," Tooth finishes, letting herself alight on the cement floor.

"Exactly."

"Well, for the moment, _his_ motives are _our_ motives. Letting us work together to build new things, make some changes—"

"—get out of here with fifty kids in tow?" Jack asks suddenly, looking toward the ship.

"Cosmos!" North exclaims. "Let us go. Lead the way, Jack."

Obediently, the pilot sets them off at a light jog, slow enough to allow Jamie to keep up at his side. In the distance, a few of the children are hovering on the ship's open ramp to peer in their direction.

"It will _not_ be fun to explain this to IGC," North mutters.

"Two weeks aboard a tiny tin can with dozens of ankle-biters," Bunny begins remorsefully,

Jack laughs. He has the feeling after all this time that statements like this are mostly bark and no bite. "You're terrible. It won't be _that _bad. You'll see."

"Fifty or more of them," Tooth replies absently, as if she's speaking to herself. "How are we going to manage it?"

.

.

.

**A/N: **This is a very long chapter. It just got out of hand :-) Hopefully it doesn't seem too fast, but to be honest, I never intended for this story to be more than a dozen or so chapters (if I took all the time I needed to flesh this out with all the subplots and ideas in my head, it would take months and I would have no life. Plus, the monster plot bunnies for other stories are rearing their heads. You know how it is.). Right now, I'm planning one more chapter and an epilogue, which (depending on the length I get to) I might try to post back-to-back, but we'll see how it happens.

Thanks to everyone who favorited and reviewed, as always! Your feedback and encouragement really help me get inspired to write, and I love to read them all :-) Here's to the guest reviewers I couldn't thank by PM:

Guest: Hahaha, I think having Pitch come across as "spectacularly creepy" is a huge compliment. Thanks :-D Hope you liked the update!

JFunderburker: Yay! I'm really glad my terrible attempts at humor have been at least a little bit funny, lol. Especially now that the "crap has hit the fan!" Thanks for the great feedback!

Guest TGS: Yeah, the pacing is definitely very quick right now, and I do apologize for that. I debated stretching things out more, but my plan for this story was to keep it relatively short, which meant moving kinda quickly…which is not to say I won't go back and polish things up in the distant future, but I guess it doesn't really help for right now :-/ Still, glad to hear that the suspense (and the more unpredictable version of Pitch) worked last chapter – it's been really fun to write! Hope it all paid off in this chapter. Thanks again for the compliments and the constructive criticism!

Please leave a review, even just a few words, to let me know what you liked/disliked – I read them all, and it really helps me figure out what parts of my writing work and what parts don't.

Until next time!

ket


	10. The Best Kind of Kidnapping

**.**

**10 – The Best Kind of Kidnapping**

**.**

The last stars of the Archal Galaxy are beginning to fade into the glittering tapestry behind the _Guardian_ when Sophie finally falls asleep in Jack's lap. Her brother is nesting somewhere in his makeshift hibernaculum beneath the dashboard, cocooned in part by his itchy, military-grade blanket and in part by the radiating warmth of the machinery. If the faint snorting sounds of his breathing are anything to go by, the ship has finally lulled him to sleep, regardless of the inadequate bedding Jack and the Guardians have been able to provide him or any of the other children.

Sophie is a heavy and warm weight across the pilot's legs and chest—though the position isn't as uncomfortable as he might have expected. She's always so quiet that Jack can't be sure whether she's fallen asleep, and he has to lean forward a little, craning his head around to be sure she's really out. Her head lolls back against his shoulder, mouth half open, and he can't help but smile down at her.

The relative quiet has become a rare thing these last few days. Ordinarily, the sounds of shrieking and chatter and laughter flow incessantly from the hallway behind him, often even breaking into the cockpit itself if the children are bored enough. The_ Guardian _is too small to offer enough beds for the horde of children they've picked up, meaning that most of them have had to camp out on the floor of the cargo bay and in the corners of the kitchen. Because he so rarely used it, Jack offered up his bedroom, which now sleeps two kids on the bed and four on the floor—five if they get along well enough.

They had made a pit stop on BL-413 to drop off the leprechaun children and to repair and refuel the_ Guardian—_which happened much faster thanks to the services of the grateful leprechaun families, who had been stunned speechless by the return of their children—but it still left Jack and the Guardians with thirty-two children for transport to IGC headquarters. If North, Bunny, Tooth, and Sandy had intended to get anything done on the way back to the HAB Sector planets, it's obviously no longer a possibility now that they don't have a moment's peace: over the past few days, they have been mostly responsible for the care and keeping of the children, though they seem laughably out of touch with this tiny demographic of their customers. Bunny feeds them too many sweets, leaving them to have cartwheel contests in the cargo bay. Tooth is too polite to be firm when they need it. And Jack can only roll his eyes when he hears North ineffectually coaxing a kid down from using the ceiling pipes as monkey bars.

They've gotten better in short bursts. At least the kids have stopped racing up and down the corridors, anyway.

And most of the kids have grown bored with the quiet pilot up in the cockpit, no matter how spectacular the view. Only Sophie and Jamie regularly keep him company, both of them comforted, most likely, by their familiarity with him over the other Guardians and entranced by the workings of the Nav board and the light sweep of stars across the skies. They are joined occasionally by friends of theirs Jack only vaguely remembers from FS-12: Pippa, a shy, spindly girl with a smattering of light freckles dusted across her face; Monty, a fidgety blond boy with thick glasses; Claude and Caleb, a pair of identical twins; and Cupcake, a large girl with dark hair cropped just at her ears. Pippa and Cupcake are currently sprawled in the corner and out of the way, though Jack isn't sure where the others have gone for the night.

He looks at the clock. _SIT 02:46. _It's late—or early—and Jack must be the only one still awake. Gingerly, he pulls Sophie into his arms, angling her so that her head falls into the crook of his elbow and scooping his other arm under her legs. He picks her up awkwardly, shuffling across the floor to deposit her beside her brother. After a pause, he pulls the blanket up to her chin, and then he straightens.

Stretching his arms overhead, Jack drops back into his seat, thinking that he should go to sleep soon himself. He leans against the console, yawning, and stretches his senses out almost instinctually to sift through the swirling mass of warm radiation and cooling darkness. He can feel the perimeter stars of the Andral region edging forward almost imperceptibly, the arms of their solar flares dancing in the void. Freezing jets of dust drip from the tails of a family of distant comets, and pockets of cold shadow lengthen across the dark side of a nearby moon. Farther off, a rapid expansion of clouds of gas and dust brims from a dying star, its death throes sinking the surrounding planets into frozen waste.

A hand presses lightly on his shoulder. "Jack?"

Jack looks up blearily to find Tooth staring down at him, her violet eyes strikingly pale in the borrowed starlight. "Sorry," he says. "Lost in thought."

"I can see that. Aren't you tired? You've been awake for ages."

"So have you. Weren't you up early getting breakfast ready this morning?"

Tooth smiles and drops into the seat beside him. "I never considered how hard it would be to actually _get _all of them from BL-413 to the IGC headquarters on Andros. Cosmos, but they can tuck away a lot of food. It's lucky we've got more than enough funds to keep them here." She yawns widely, throwing her head back a little. "But from their attitudes, you'd think we took them on a camping trip."

"Well, I guess they're just happy to be going home. Get away from Pitch and all that. But I think we're probably all ready to hit Andros, even the kids. They aren't too bad yet, but they're definitely starting to get homesick and worried again. And probably claustrophobic, too. The IGC's waiting for them, right?"

"North contacted them as soon as we were in range. From what I've heard, they're pretty much running around to get in touch with all of the parents from what info the kids gave us."

"And I'm sure they're trying to find a way to spin it," Jack snorts. Tooth looks at him curiously. "Because they obviously turned a blind eye to it," he explains. "No way they didn't know at least some of these kids were missing, even if they're all from 'low-income sectors.' They'll probably say they've been working on it in secret this whole time or something."

Tooth leans back in her chair, frowning, but she doesn't refute his statement. "We didn't know about the missing kids, or about the IGC looking the other way. You know that, right?"

"I know," Jack says, and it's the truth: as oddly naïve and swaddled as the Guardians are in their own little worlds, he can't imagine them knowing. "You were a little distracted by your…genetic mod stuff. And your missing research and prototype." He frowns, swiveling in his chair to look back out into space. "Which we never got back. What are you going to do without it, anyway?"

Tooth hums. "I'm honestly not sure I can stomach more development on this after what we've seen on BL-413. But if we decide to continue, it'll take ages to rebuild the prototype—especially since Pitch swiped all of our data and blueprints. But we'll manage. And even though we never expected to find out what we did on this journey, I think it's been worth it…because we've learned about the risks. How people can twist something meant to be good into something terrible. We've learned that we can't just charge into something like this. It'll take thought. Planning."

She reaches out to squeeze his hand. Surprised, he looks at her to find her expression open and earnest. "I know Pitch did awful things to you, and I know you're still worried about mods. You'll probably never trust them. But I'm _sure _there's a way to construct a system without building on fear. I can tell you still don't completely trust us with this—" Jack opens his mouth to object, but she continues on without pausing, "—and I don't blame you in the least. And I can see where you're coming from, but we're _friends_ now. You'll just have to let us show you over time that we mean no harm."

Jack hesitates, and then he smiles. "Yeah, I'm sure you're right." When he allows himself to imagine it, he feels as if he could relax around the Guardians, could let them in. They know more about him than any living beings in the universe—maybe even including Maggie now—and he's still never found a reason to mistrust them in spite of it. Not that he's sure he'll be around that long. With their joint travels coming to an end, Jack expects the journey to finish as abruptly as all his others: he delivers them safely to their destination, and then they part ways, all communication trailing off within a few days. A clean break.

To his surprise, she seems to follow his line of thought, though not fully. Leaning back in her seat, she asks, "So, where are you off to next?" He raises his eyebrows, and she laughs. "I have the sense that you won't want to be cooped up with us in the HAB Sector for too long. You're too at home out here in space."

"I don't know. I never really do. I guess usually something ends up falling into my lap, or I catch wind of some rumor to chase, and then I'm off."

Tooth sighs. "Must be nice, living like that. Always seeing and doing something new, meeting people, that sort of thing. Though I expect it can be a bit difficult to find jobs sometimes."

"You bet it is. Sometimes, it seems like ages between them."

"You know you're welcome to work with us if you want. I don't know what you're after, but I know we can find you a job."

Jack snorts. "Doing what? I don't have the brains for anything you do. All I know is ships, and they're all I want to work with."

"I know," Tooth replies thoughtfully, "But even so, you should consider it. We could use your help. We've got plenty of pilots willing to fly the HAB Sector, but none of them know the Reaches, and most of them aren't even willing to get near them. I'm sure we could find something for you."

Jack hums. He isn't sure what to make of the offer, whether Tooth is just talking or whether she means it, whether there could really be a place for him to help. He doesn't see how. He is casting about for a change of subjects when Tooth suddenly turns to face the approaching stars. "Do you use them often? Your powers—or your senses, I mean. You said you use them to navigate sometimes."

"Yeah, I actually…I use them all the time now." As if the words unlock something, he lets his senses stretch out a little, not enough to draw his focus from the conversation too severely, but enough to gather a reading of their general area. Still, even this small amount of sensory displacement must register on his face, in the vagueness of his gaze or the softening of his smile, because Tooth stares at him. "To be honest, even though I hate what I went through, and I hate Pitch for all he's done, I wouldn't want to give them back. They're a part of me now, and they're useful, and…I love being able to map out the stars. The universe. To know what it all _feels _like_._" But the words don't quite express it. He's not sure to explain how the appeal of his power goes beyond plain usefulness. Describing to Tooth the cold beauty of a distant, shadowed dwarf planet or the thick blankets of natural frost that stretch across deep space would be like explaining the colors of a sunset to a blind man.

Tooth smiles anyway, seeming to understand that his hesitation is from uncertainty rather than reticence. "That makes sense. They're a part of you now. It seems like it would be hard to let them go." Jack nods slowly, and Tooth lets the subject drop. In the quiet, it's just possible to make out the soft breathing of the children nestled in the corner of the room. Tooth glances around at the piles of ragged blankets covering the floor. "Are you going to go home?"

Jack turns to stare.

"To FS-12," she clarifies. "Are you going to see your family?"

Frowning, Jack glances to the side, where Jamie and Sophie have already intertwined their limbs for warmth. "I've been thinking about it more often," he manages finally. Seeing Jamie and the others again has made him begin to wonder about his own family. About Maggie. He can't even imagine what she must look like now, years older, and in his mind she still has the same lightly freckled face and messy short hair she had when she was eleven. But he also can't imagine she'll be particularly pleased to see him after all these years. Not after he's been sending money sporadically whenever he can, as though to pay her out of sheer guilt…which he supposes isn't far from the truth. And he's not sure how to explain it all to her, how to make her understand that he'd never meant to leave her alone for this long, except that Pitch had made a monster out of him and he'd had to figure out how to deal with it.

Tooth lets him think for a few moments, and then she nods as though she hadn't really expected an answer from him. "You need to go," she says finally. "It makes me a hypocrite to say it, because I've never gone back to mine in person aside from writing letters to some of my sisters, but you should go if you can." She sighs, pulling herself to her feet. "Otherwise, you'll always wonder."

Some emotion surges into Jack's throat, and he doesn't immediately respond. Tooth drops a quick peck onto the top of his head and strides out of the cockpit, leaving him with only the stars for company.

.

Their arrival on Andros is greeted with more fanfare than Jack has ever seen in his life. As they sweep into the exosphere, the planet below just a swirling mass of billowing clouds slipping over brown land, dozens of ships laze through the air around them, their hulls glittering like beetle wings in the dim sunlight. Media-class starships, from the looks of them, all thick and unwieldy, with wide windows spanning their long observation decks, which are packed with onlookers. As Jack steers theshiptoward the planet's surface, the other starships drift slowly out of his way, aiming their ships' domed receivers in the direction of the _Guardian_ to snag enough footage for their intergalactic broadcasts.

By now, Jack has spent over a month in the company of the Guardians, and in that time, he has almost managed to forget who they are and, more specifically, how famous they are. Despite the Guardians' relative reclusiveness, they are still high-profile figures. Obviously, the news of their return has inevitably gotten out, but the presence of such huge swaths of starships upon their arrival likely means that media outlets have also caught wind of the _reason _for their coming—namely, the dozens of children that now press their noses to every available porthole and pack themselves into the cockpit so tightly that the room becomes almost uncomfortably warm. As _The Guardian _drips into the upper levels of the troposphere, the kids crane their necks to get a good look at the metallic sheen of the buildings rushing toward them, clamoring in excitement as a handful of IGC Enforcement pods dart between the smaller media ships to escort them to their destination.

The IGC headquarters are about as bleak as Jack has always imagined them, all sleek grey walls and glossy black floors and stark lighting. About a dozen guards in black suits meet them in the hangar, a mixture of races that includes two squat leprechauns and a green-haired forest nymph. The guards guide them from the hangar and into the building, following a series of hallways lined with backlit display cases and glaring at the kids as they dart back and forth to look at the photos and medals of recognition inside. At a disdainful look from one of the guards, Jack pulls Sophie away from where she is streaking rows of fingerprints across the glass cases, patting her shoulder in a _stay here _sort of way.

It's the kind of place that makes Jack squirm, mostly because the sterile atmosphere and regimented command system reminds him of Pitch's labs, but also because he hates the looming feeling of the heavy structure pressing in from all around him. It's almost as though the weight of the thousands of pounds of cement above him and all around him crushes his senses—though it doesn't really. He can sense heat and temperatures of the emptiness of space around them, the dim nearby sun and the few frozen satellites orbiting this planet, and the sensation calms him as much as the presence of Mags did when they were younger. It's just that the weight of this place blankets him and makes him feel uncomfortably trapped.

But it's more than that, too. The IGC headquarters are not a place Jack has ever thought he would willingly set foot. Not after so long spent avoiding them at all costs. Jack's pretty sure he's got nothing on his record to give the IGC any cause for alarm—he's been careful on that account, and his part in all of the smuggling jobs he's taken over the years has been minimal. Still, something about actually _being _here makes the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, like at any second the agents will realize who he is—and that he could probably name dozens of the most vexing smugglers plaguing the trade system—and pounce upon him.

"What's wrong?" Sophie asks suddenly. At some point, she has slipped her hand into his again without his noticing.

"Nothing. I'm fine," Jack replies automatically, squeezing her palm. Passing IGC workers stare at them, walking close to the walls to let the flood of children through.

Beside his sister, Jamie drags his eyes away from a golden-framed painting of some tentacled creature. "You look like wolves just made off with your goat."

Jack snorts out a laugh, and he suspects at Jamie's triumphant grin that this is what the boy intended. "This just isn't my type of thing. Being around a ton of people and stuck in a skyscraper."

"Yeah, I liked being on the ship better, too," Jamie replies simply, his gaze drawn once more to the display cases.

The Guardians don't have any qualms about being the center of attention, or if they do, they certainly don't show it. The four of them head the line of children, ignoring the eyes falling upon them as they pass. Once they reach their destination—a large waiting room lined with a maze of metal chairs—the Guardians take charge, settling the kids in for a long wait.

"We'll have to take the five of you to a separate room to get all of this straightened out," says one of the IGC agents, who peers about the room at the chattering kids. "The Missing Persons Department will take care of processing all of them while we talk. We've already got some parents who've landed or are on their way, but we're going to get everything on record and confirm guardianships before we release any of them." The man is too professional to show overt signs of annoyance at the mention of this task, which will likely take hours, if not days, but his face seems to sag in exhaustion. His eyes fall on Jack as he finishes looking about the room.

North jumps in before the man can say more. "Ah! I believe Jack can stay here. He is an old friend; I called upon him once we left the Kambaba Galaxy because the ship we borrowed from Pitch's labs did not fare well. He picked us up in his ship and brought us here." North turns his head to look at Jack so the agents cannot see his face. He winks.

"So you didn't see Pitch's labs?" the man asks.

Jack shakes his head slowly, still reeling at the words "his ship" and trying to catch hold of North's intentions.

The man's eyes flit up and down Jack dismissively. "Stay here, then, and we'll find you if you're needed. The rest of you, if you'll follow me?"

The Guardians slip out of the room, trailing behind the IGC agent and leaving Jack alone with the small horde of children. Well, not alone entirely. There are three or four IGC agents settling into place against the walls, but the children give them a wide berth to avoid their disconcerting gazes. Now that they have arrived at their destination, the boisterous atmosphere has transformed into something more mournful and anxious. Sensing the excitement of their journey beginning to fade, perhaps, or that they will soon be paired with their families again, the children grow quieter. They huddle in small groups or pace the room restlessly or curl across the rows of empty seats. Some of them cry silently in little balls on the floor.

Some of them are drawn to Jack, who has been a constant, if often quiet, feature throughout their journey. Like a flock of multicolored sheep, they press close to him, clamoring to be near his seat and asking a thousand variations of _When will my mother and father come? _until they become accustomed to his apologetic, noncommittal answers.

After many of the others have grown bored with him, returning to their whispered conversations as though afraid the IGC agents seated across the room will hear them wishing for home, Jack slumps back in his seat and closes his eyes. He can hardly believe this is over, can hardly believe it worked out so _well. _

A sudden, crushing weight collapses onto him, squeezing most of the air from his lungs. He coughs and opens his eyes to find Sophie curling up onto his lap. She constricts him in a hug, pressing her forehead to his chest. "Hey, Soph," he says quietly. He's not sure why, but the anticipatory mood of the room makes him keep his voice low. "You okay?"

She nods without looking up. "Where will we go?"

Jack rubs her back, as he used to with Mags when she was sick. "Well…home, I guess. Like everyone."

Jamie drapes himself across the seat beside him. "No, she means…We don't have a mom or a dad," he explains softly.

_Oh, _Jack remembers, though he says nothing aloud. He's not sure what he _could_ say. But Jamie looks so tired that Jack reaches out before he can reconsider to ruffle the boy's hair. Like a cat leaning in to touch, Jamie flops over against Jack's shoulder and stays there, unmoving.

_Without a place to go, _Jack thinks, _they'll be here a long time. _"We'll figure something out," he says, thinking. "The Guardians might know something, or the IGN…well, they might be able to help, I guess."

"But what if they can't?" Jamie asks. His face is half-pressed against Jack's chest, and his voice comes out oddly muffled, though it might also be thick with emotion. "We don't have anyone. We'll be alone."

"No, you won't," Jack replies firmly. "Because we're all friends, and friends help each other out, right? So who's looking out for you?"

Sophie straightens up to look at him. Her smile is hesitant and watery. "You?"

"Me, that's who," Jack confirms, though his voice sounds stronger than he feels.

_._

The children are taken and returned for processing one by one. Their names are called by a dark-haired agent, who herds them into her office to take a statement and determine the location of their families. The minutes stretch and flow in sticky, drawn-out sections, and Jack loses track of time altogether under the constant fluorescent lighting of the waiting room. At intervals, food is provided for them, the generic plates of salads and sandwiches expected of the IGC budget. It is three or four hours before the Guardians finally return to the room.

By that time, it feels late. On Andros, it is only early afternoon by Jack's best guess, but according to the standard intergalactic time they have all been following for the last few weeks, it is well past midnight. Jamie is fast asleep beside Jack, and Sophie is curled up across his legs. A number of the other children are snoring nearby as well: Pippa managed to nod off under a row of chairs, and two or three others are piled atop each other for warmth and comfort.

Jack drags himself from a doze to find the Guardians staring about the room in tired amusement, eyes drifting over the children asleep in odd positions and the ones fighting the pull of exhaustion. "We'll need the agents to find us some pillows and blankets," Tooth says matter-of-factly, and she turns back to the door, rubbing her eyes. Bunny nods and trails behind her.

Instead of following, North sinks into the empty seat to Jack's right. "You are clear," he says quietly and without preamble. "We change story just a bit. Of course, if they manage to reach Pitch's facility very soon, the technicians may tell them—Pitch may tell them, if he is still…" Once it becomes clear that North won't complete the sentence, Jack tries to guess what he'd meant to say: _Sane? Alive? There? _North shakes his head and continues. "But I doubt any of them will be foolish enough to remain present in the laboratory at this point. They will know the IGC is coming for them."

"And Pitch?" Jack presses hesitantly, sitting up as much as he dares with Sophie on his lap. "If he's…?"

"We will be keeping feelers out for Pitch. If he is alive, we will find him and take care of him." The pilot almost asks what North means by this, but the grim set to North's jaw deters him. He has the feeling North doesn't intend to give Pitch a lecture and pat him on the head. Something in Jack's expression makes North smile. "We have extensive network. Now that we know what we should be looking for, we will find him if he can be found."

Jack nods slowly, surprised at the comfort the words have instilled.

Satisfied, North nods and leans back in his seat. At the far end of the room, Sandy drifts thoughtfully from child to child, smiling beatifically down at them as he passes. Jack remembers that most of his inventions have to do with dreaming and virtual reality, and he wonders what the tiny comet sees in these slumbering children. "We will be moving on to SCORPio from here," North adds suddenly. "The IGC will be taking care of the placement of children with families, so we will wait to leave until the arrangements are made for all of them."

"Are they going to be sending ships off to their planets?"

"Yes and no," North says. "Some families are arriving to receive child by themselves. Others are too far away and need transport help—but there are too many destinations for IGC to take care of personally. From what I understand, the IGC is assigning some children to passenger ships and merchant vessels." Jack nods, watching Sandy tuck a boy's dangling legs onto a chair to make the child's position look more comfortable. "I hope you do not mind, but I volunteered you to take children needing to go to FS-12."

"To FS-12? How did you…do _all _of you know I'm going home?" Jack asks exasperatedly at North's amused glance.

"Tooth is very bad at keeping secrets. You will remember this in future," North laughs. "But I thought you might like some company—to get your mind off worries."

"Yeah, I just—haven't seen my sister in a while," Jack explains.

"I am sure she will be glad for your visit," North says kindly, bumping his shoulder against Jack's. "And proud, when she learns of all you have done."

Jack isn't so sure about the last part—it doesn't seem like there can be any pride after his initial abandonment, but he says nothing, and North doesn't press.

"The IGC has approved you to take seven children to their homes on FS-12 using the _Guardian._ After that, she is all yours. Payment for job well done. In addition to the credits in your account, of course," North adds, winking.

"Thanks, North," Jack says warmly.

"And Jack," North adds, "you know that we could use your help—if you still seek a job. The_ Guardian _is yours to take and to use as long as you like, but we could use ears and eyes out in the Reaches from time to time. No one knows them as you do, and we could use the help trading, finding materials, transporting goods. The planets in the Reaches likely need our goods more than HAB Sector."

Jack nods slowly. A few weeks ago, he would have turned the offer down instantly, even though he knows what it means—regular income, regular work, a regular life. Back then, he would have been too wary to give the offer any real consideration, too fearful of the possibility that these industrial giants will use him, chew him up, and spit him out. But the Guardians are nothing like what Jack expected, and he thinks now that if he goes to work for them, the effort would be more than employment—it would be a partnership.

Still, he can't discard the last vestiges of his old, stubborn anxieties. "I'll think about it," he offers, chewing the inside of his cheek.

North nods, looking amused, and Jack wonders if North somehow knows the pilot will accept, just as Tooth knew he was going home to FS-12. Wonders if North knows the pilot is only delaying the inevitable. "Of course. Take all the time you need."

.

The_ Guardian _is stationed close enough to the immense door of the IGC hangar that Sophie can stand at the threshold to watch the agents at work without being too far from the ship. As he and Jamie hoist a particularly heavy box onto the automated moving dolly, Jack keeps an eye on her to be sure she doesn't stray too far.

"Who _gave _us all this?" Jamie grunts, pushing the box into place. He sports a new hoodie vest over a long-sleeved shirt, though he still shivers a little in the chill of Andros's breezy spring.

"A bunch of donors, they said," Jack explains. He turns to find that their pile of allotted boxes has finally dwindled down to a pair of smaller packages. Monty scoops them up to balance them precariously atop the stack of boxes already in place on the dolly.

The blond boy steps back to adjust his thick glasses. "Yeah, but how come?"

Jack shrugs. "People from all over Andros, I guess. Once they found out that you guys didn't have any clothes or belongings or anything, stuff just came pouring in. I mean, you've seen how public this whole thing is, right? The media ships?"

Monty nods solemnly, and Jamie steps across the polished floor to join his sister at the threshold, peering up at the pale sky. Out in the distance, as near as IGC regulations will allow, is a handful of media ships hovering just above the horizon. The tiny black pinpricks dance like a swarm of gnats. As far as they are, Jack has the feeling that they're still broadcasting. Probably, they're even using their long-range cameras to grab footage as a backdrop for their newscasts. The thought of this kind of observation makes his skin crawl, but the kids don't seem to mind it if they're aware of it at all.

For his part, Monty is too busy staring at the inside of the hangar, where IGC agents and carts and automated dollies buzz to and fro to load and unload ships. A few yards away, a small, military-class Endeval 21-R hums to life as its tiny crew readies it for takeoff.

"Only now we gotta pack," Sophie says abruptly. "Before, we were gonna leave right away, but there's all this _stuff_."

Jamie shakes his head, breaking out of his trance. He cuffs her lightly on the back of the head and steps away from the door. "Come help so we can leave faster."

She turns primly on her heel, and the donated yellow dress she had excitedly selected earlier this morning swirls gently around her knees. They follow the automated dolly up the ramp and into the belly of the_ Guardian. _Inside, neat rows of boxes line the edges of the cargo bay. Claude and Caleb sprawl atop them, chattering aimlessly, but they spring to their feet to begin unloading the boxes at the dolly's approach. Beside them, Pippa and Cupcake scurry from bin to bin, opening each to dissect its contents before dutifully entering the information into a brand-new holo-comm, presented courtesy of a children's hospital the next planet over.

"It's like, almost all clothes," Cupcake explains at their approach. She lifts the lid of one of the bins to reveal a multicolored set of shirts, all tightly folded and packed into the container as neatly as sticks of gum. "Except a lot of it's kinda useless. Just shirts and shorts and stuff—but it's cold here, and it's colder back home."

"But they did get us some _really _good winter gear, but only a little," Pippa corrects, waving them over to the corner where she rummages through the contents of one of the bins. "Check it out…"

Laid out before her are a few pairs of thick, fur-lined boots and heavy scarves and jackets. As Pippa pulls out the additional winter garb from a neighboring bin, Jack sees that these have all come in varying sizes: some are too small for even Sophie, but one of the lined jackets looks as though it might even swallow Jack himself.

"Cool!" squeals Sophie, who is already looping a pink scarf around her neck.

"We'll need those where we're going," Jamie adds grimly, frowning down at the garments. His expression is so solemn that Jack is on the verge of asking what's worrying him, but Jamie presses on before he has the chance. "And besides, it can get kind of cold around here sometimes. Especially around _you, _Jack—sometimes when you're thinking. I don't know if you know you do it."

It's the first time any of them has mentioned Jack's powers at all, though he knows that they are more than aware of them following their excursions in Pitch's facility. The children's eyes fall upon him as one.

"Yeah, with your…" Claude begins, and then he flushes.

"Sorry," Jack replies sheepishly.

Pippa shrugs. "You saved us when we were there. So what if the room gets a little cold every now and then? It's good to know you can do it if you need to."

Hooking a hand into one of the pockets of Jack's leather jacket and pulling herself onto his foot, Sophie peers up at him. "We still like you, even if you make ice sometimes."

The approval is succinct, but he can feel the others weigh and accept the words as well. Warmed and embarrassed, Jack scrubs the back of his neck. "Is it just clothes, then?"

Pippa shakes her head as she begins to record the contents of the next bin. "There's a lot of food, too. Stuff that won't really go bad, and somebody even gave us cooked meals they put in stabilization containers so we can warm them later. We put it all in the kitchen," she adds, "but we're gonna have to figure out how to make room in there. We got a _lot _of food."

"Too bad we didn't get any spare parts. That could've been more useful," Jamie says, swiping a hat from Pippa's bin before she closes it. It's an old-fashioned blue trapper hat with the woolen flaps folded up, and he crams it onto his head. "Like when we had to stop after we left Pitch's labs to repair the ship. They should've sent us a spare thrustal or something."

"Thruster," Jack corrects, leaning his elbow onto Jamie's head. "And I don't think that would have fit in the boxes. Besides, it'd be hard to tote around a bunch of heavy spare parts. It'd eat up all our fuel, and—well, we don't really have space for them anymore. We'll just have to wing it."

"What if we get stuck?" Sophie asks.

"We won't. We're not exactly planning on running around under heavy gunfire, and I can tell if we need regular ship maintenance. And besides, it's not _that _far to FS-12. Just a little over a week."

"Can we pick our bunks now?" Claude asks, bouncing with excitement. He and Caleb have spoken of little else but going home for the past day, and their broad, identical smiles are contagious.

"Go for it," Jack replies, and they shoot off almost before he's managed the first syllable. Monty gives chase, calling for them to wait up, and Cupcake trails behind.

Jamie waits for them to go before turning to Jack, who slides his arm away. "What about us? Me and Sophie and Pippa and Monty? The others have families. But ours are gone, so where are we going to go?"

Jack frowns, shuffling in place. He'd gotten the official documentation just a few hours ago, a formal, curt message pulling up on his holo-comm. "Not the place back home in Burgess, Mrs. Marm's, if that's what you're thinking. They lined you up with an orphanage in one of the bigger towns, and they're trying to coordinate things with foster families."

"I don't want to go there," Sophie says at once. "I didn't like the first one."

Jamie is biting his lip, and he won't look directly at Jack. "Do we have to go? The last place wasn't all that…" he trails off.

"Will they even know if we don't make it to the orphanage?" Pippa asks abruptly. Her dark eyes are piercing. "Will anyone even care?"

Jack has been trying to work out the answers to these questions all morning, trying to follow the line of communication from the IGC to the orphanage, which has yet to contact him in person. He thinks the answer is _no_, but he isn't sure he should say as much—because that would be too hopeful, wouldn't it? Allowing himself to consider, for just a moment, the idea of _not _being alone anymore, of having company on this ship. Earlier, he caught himself sifting through the list of jobs he can tackle now that he's got the flexibility of his own ship, weighing them for safety concerns and placing them somewhere on the spectrum of legality in his mind. Listing them according to their suitability for a ship that permanently houses children.

"Oi! Jack!" A familiar voice resounds from outside, catching on the metal walls of the room to echo slightly. Jack offers the solemn children an apologetic look as he moves to the doorway, stepping onto the ramp.

Bunny grins up at him from the foot of it, his furry paws folded across his chest. Beside him, North and Tooth and Sandy have assembled to smile up at Jack.

The pilot smiles back and clambers down the ramp. "What brings you here? I thought you were going to ship out this morning, now that they're done processing all the kids."

"Oh, we stayed to be sure they all got onto their ships safely," Tooth replies, her wings fluttering in the thin, musty breeze from outside.

Sandy nods exuberantly, signs slipping into place above his head. Jack still can't make out it all, but he's gotten better. "Something…'say goodbye?' You came to say goodbye?" The comet beams.

"And to give important news: we Guardians well be having meeting next month. Well, really five weeks. Is mandatory for all members."

Jack stares at him blankly.

"That means you, Frostbite," Bunny clarifies in exasperation.

"Me? But I'm not…I mean, I'm not really…"

"You're one of us now," Tooth replies, her expression a mixture of slyness and triumph.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, you _are _taking job, are you not?"

Jack is. He really decided it the moment North offered it to him in the waiting room, though he's been halfheartedly entertaining other possibilities, feeling as though the offer is too good to be true and unwilling to rely on an insubstantial promise. But for all of his reflection, he's never _really _considered abandoning such an ideal prospect—though it irritates him that North is so obviously aware of this.

Ignoring the man's knowing expression, he continues. "And if I am? That makes me a part of your super-secret club all of a sudden?"

Bunny's ears quiver in annoyance, but Tooth seems to realize Jack's uncertainty. "It does. We need you, Jack. And I think you know it," she answers gently. "We're doing what we can, when we can. But we don't have the connection you have with the people who need help most. And what's—what's the point of donations and giveaways to inner HAB Sector planets when there are planets in the Reaches that don't even have access to food or communication on _the Net…_we need to be doing more. And we don't always have the chance to really see the problems firsthand." She pauses, and Jack knows she is thinking of the embarrassment of not even _knowing _that children had been disappearing right from under their noses, even within some of their home HAB Sector planets.

"So we need you to be ears and eyes," North continues, picking up her line of thought. "We have much to do, and we are wrapped up in our own tiny bubbles. So we will have you help with transporting goods around Reach planets, giving and selling to people who need our supplies and technologies, and you will keep us informed."

"But we also just want you to call sometimes. And to visit and say 'hi,'" Tooth adds, smiling.

Sandy pipes up with what must be _Hence, the monthly meetings._

Jack smiles, a warmth bubbling in his chest. This morning, he hadn't known what to expect of his future, but he'd imagined going it alone on the_ Guardian, _the cold, vastness of space folding in around him. Now, he has the prospect of regular visits and communication to look forward to. And he might not even be as alone on the ship as he'd originally thought, now that it comes down to it. The Guardians' gesture is a simple one, and they can't know what it means to him—except that maybe they do, from the strange softness to their expressions. "I…yeah. I think that's fair," he replies slowly, feeling almost shy. "I'll check in whenever I can."

North claps a beefy hand onto his shoulder. "This is what we want to hear!" His grin is so fierce that Jack falters under the weight of it. "You will spend time around the Reaches, taking notes on politics, needs, _everything, _and we will discuss it at meeting."

"Anyway, we know you've got a delivery to make, and we don't want to slow you down," Tooth murmurs as North pulls away.

"Delivery?" Jack parrots, and then, "Right. The kids."

"But I'll check in with you soon," Tooth promises. "To coordinate things."

"Okay," Jack replies, waving uncertainly as they retreat into the hangar, funneling away into the buzz of pre-departure arrangements. He stands there for a moment after they have finally disappeared, half-disbelieving, and then he returns to the ship.

Pippa, Jamie, and Sophie are still seated on the boxes in the cargo bay when he climbs the ramp, their conversation dying away as he pins them with a thoughtful stare.

"I know you're probably tired of kidnappings," he begins, "but maybe if you don't mind it so much, we can work something out."

"What do you mean?" Pippa asks.

"I mean there's a lot of space on this shop, and a lot of food I'm not going to be able to eat by myself."

"What? Like, we can…?"

"If you want to stay here with me, you can. It'll be hard work—there'll be a lot of traveling, and we won't stay in any one place for long, and we'll be cooped up together on this ship, and it might get boring sometimes, and I can always bring you back to FS-12 later if you change your mind…"

"I wanna stay!" Sophie cries. She bounces onto Jamie, nearly toppling him onto the ground. "Can we stay? Please, let's stay!"

Jamie laughs. "You mean it, Jack? We don't have to go back—we can really live here?"

Jack nods, thinking that he is almost certainly getting himself in way over his head. But he can't help the warm grin creeping over his face. "If you want."

"You're the _best,_" Jamie says. "Of course we're staying." Pippa nods beside him a bit more reservedly, but with no less warmth.

"Good," Jack says firmly. "That settles it. Not that I'm sure kidnapping is what the Guardians had in mind, and hopefully it doesn't get them in any trouble, but…we'll dodge that hypernova when we come to it."

"But how are we going to keep going after we run out of food? What are we going to do for money?"

"We'll work for the Guardians, and they'll have our credits covered for now…they'll probably even give you extra allowances if we need. But you're going to learn," Jack says, realizing his plan as he says the words. "This ship's a bit big for one person to work alone, and I could use some help monitoring its systems, checking for maintenance, that sort of thing. You'll learn and help, and we'll get by. It'll be hard work," he warns. "So if you're not sure you want to stay, that's okay. You just have to decide by the time we hit FS-12, okay?"

"We're staying," Jamie says instantly. At his side, Sophie gives an approving nod. "I wanna learn how to fly too. And I'd rather stay here with you."

"Me too," Monty adds.

"And me," says Pippa.

Jack nods, satisfied. He punches in the code to close the exit ramp and moves past them, deeper into the ship. Their preparations are mostly complete, and all that needs to be done can be done from the cockpit. The children they spring to their feet to follow him, their faces eager and open.

"Alright, then," he replies, grinning down at Sophie as she scurries to match his stride. "We'll do this together." He reaches his seat in the cockpit, and they press in at his sides, watching as he preps the engine for takeoff. "But for now, I think I'm about ready to see some stars."

Jamie sinks into the navigator's seat. "Okay. Let's go."

.

.

.

**A/N: **And that, my friends, is the second to last chapter! Jack is FINALLY cool with the Guardians, and in the future, he's not going through his jobs alone. Things are really looking up!

Thanks, as always, to everyone who reviewed, and to those I couldn't thank by PM:

Reader22681: Kudos for catching the Portal 2 reference last chapter! I couldn't resist aligning Pitch/GLaDOS :-)

icypoolthewarrio: Glad you liked the last update! Here, have another.

Guest: Thanks so much for the feedback!

I'm hoping to have the epilogue up soon, but until then, please continue to tell me what you've liked/disliked. The feedback is awesome!

Stay gold,

ket


	11. Epilogue - Moonward Bound

**.**

**Epilogue – Moonward Bound**

.

"Go home, Maggie."

In the silence of the apothecary, the voice startles Maggie so violently that she nearly drops the vial in her hands. She fumbles and catches it, slowly setting it down on the table before turning to face Doctor Ortega, who leans against the threshold.

"I lost track of time," she murmurs, smiling. "Just clearing this up."

In the weak purple light of dusk, his dark grey hair looks almost white, the creases around his mouth and eyes deepening. As if by some signal, the automatic fluorescents above their heads buzz to life, sensing the approaching darkness of the night, but Doctor Ortega barely flinches. He stares back at her, his expression the same familiar mingled affection and pity as always.

"It's late, and you haven't stopped working since dawn. Time to go," he explains. Without another word, he steps forward to dim the record screen listing patient immunizations and prescriptions, turning to begin scooping the vials off of the table.

In the three years since she's been on her own, Doctor Ortega has been a great help to her. Like Maggie, he is alone: his wife died years ago, and his children have grown and moved away for some of the larger cities, or even off-world entirely. Of course, _he _at least hears from his children on a fairly regular basis, unlike Maggie's experience with _her _last remaining flesh and blood. Jack has never even bothered to so much as send her a birthday message.

They return the pills and vials to their places around the room, which is organized with clusters of narrow shelves labeled in the doctor's neat handwriting. Their joint cleaning unearths the Overland family's old holo-comm, which Maggie has been using to access the pharmacy text she's been reading.

"Still studying?" Doctor Ortega asks mildly, picking it up to swipe through a few pages.

Sifting through the wall of antibiotics for the matching label, Maggie shrugs without looking back. "I'll be old enough to take the certification exam in a year," she notes, dropping another bottle of pills into place.

"I could use the help," the doctor admits ruefully. Maggie turns as he sets the holo-comm back down. "But you know I wish you'd get out of here. Find something else. This rock is no place to live."

Maggie stares at him blankly. "Where else would I go? This is my home. My whole family's lived here."

Doctor Ortega opens his mouth as if to retort, but he sighs and changes his mind at the last second. "Right," he says quietly. He scrutinizes her face. "Well, get some rest, Maggie. I'll see you in the morning."

He squeezes her shoulder and sweeps out of the door almost before she has the chance to mumble a quiet _goodbye, _heading for his rooms in the back of the clinic.

A little after Maggie's mother died, he'd offered her a place in the rooms upstairs, where a handful of elderly tenants still reside. The arrangement would have made a lot of sense: Maggie spends more time in the apothecary than anywhere else, and it would cut out the long walks to and from Overland Farm every day. But Maggie has lived on the farm all of her life, and to abandon its wide open spaces now is almost more than she can imagine. After all these years, she knows every creak of wood and every rustle of plant or animal. The farm is her last living friend.

_Stop sounding crazy, _she chastises herself, donning her sweater and then her bulky, fur-lined overcoat. _This is why the doctor looks at you like you're nuts all the time._

Wrapping her scarf around her neck, she steps out of the dusty clinic and into the biting cold of the winter evening. The clinic's bright display window scrolls through the same images of computerized skin grafts as always, and the three-dimensional neon display shimmers against the heavy snow, which crunches under her boots as she steps through the side street and onto the village's main thoroughfare.

It's later than she thought. The market square is already packed with people, most of them crammed to either side against the shops and vendor stalls scattered around the area. A few forest nymphs drift past, traders by the looks of them, and that means that there will probably be some HAB Sector fruit now, maybe even golden pears from the Loftian Galaxy—not that she can bring herself to eat those anymore. Not since Jack left.

The smell of meat pies wafts from the butcher's shop at her left. Maggie's got enough credits to buy some good meat now that Doctor Ortega's paying her for her help, but she's spent so long living off almost nothing that she can't bring herself to part with the money now. Besides, she's grown enough on the farm to last her a while without paying.

The payments she'd gotten from Jack had begun only a month after he'd left. She can still remember seeing the credits in her bank account, her hands shaking knowing where they'd come from, even with nothing to describe the source except a transfer number. The money had been irregular after that, but every credit had helped, especially after her mother died and left an almost unfathomable amount of debt in her wake. It had taken her three years to pay it all off, eating only food she'd grown herself and saving every credit received from Jack and Doctor Ortega, but it's over now. The farm is hers, and she's put down roots—some of them literal—and managed to make things her own. Maybe it's silly, but the thought inspires a fierce sort of pride in her.

She turns off of the main road and toward the icy stretch of land leading to the farm. Wind whips through the barren trees as she trudges through the snow. _It's kind of a lonely thing, being out here like this, _she thinks to herself. The land around the farm is quiet, her nearest neighbor a half a mile away, but she doesn't usually mind the isolation. Over these past few years, she's become the sort of person who keeps to herself.

The darkness of the woods deepens around her, the last vestiges of sunlight slipping from between the black boughs of the trees and toward the horizon. In its place drifts a fat full moon, which turns the snow at her feet to glowing silver. Even in the relative darkness and with heavy snow covering the dirt trail, Maggie knows her way by heart. She could probably walk it blindly if she needed to.

As she reaches the crest of the hillside, she can make out the farm sprawling in the distance just through the trees, the blocky bulk of her darkened home and the edge of the solar-powered fence. She pauses, partially to heave a few breaths to regain her energy after trudging through snow for so long and partially for Spruce. The sheepdog, the only member of her family still around, always rushes to meet her at this point. Spruce is getting a bit old—nearly eight, if Maggie remembers correctly—but she still bounds over with the same unyielding sort of energy that she'd had as a pup.

At least, usually. Maggie trots down the slope of the hill, her boots slipping a little in the snow. Spruce barks in the distance, as she sometimes does to keep the sheep in place. Maggie can faintly hear the sounds of the dog's movement through the snow. It's hard to make out much of the house in the twilight, but with the snow reflecting the pale light of the moon, Maggie catches a glimpse of the stranger standing near the fence.

She stops short a few yards away. No one visits Overland Farm. Maggie's friends and family are scattered to the wind, either dead or fled to larger cities or lost to the Collectors.

The stranger is a boy a little older than she, with narrow shoulders and hair that glows silver in the moonlight. He's bent over backward against the fence, half-holding Spruce and half-blocking her from licking his face and shoulders and anywhere else she can reach. And he's laughing. It's a weirdly distinctive sound, a sort of cackle that sends shivers across Maggie's skin.

Maggie's got nothing she can use as a weapon. It's always been safe here on FS-12, aside from a few drunken mishaps a year down the road around the market square. So it's just as well that Spruce seems to trust this stranger—or even to know him.

As she approaches, the boy looks up. The moonlight shines right into his eyes, shimmering across the familiar ridge of his thin nose and casting shadows beneath his dark brows, and then the resemblance hits her so forcefully that Maggie takes a step back. She's got no recent pictures of her brother; the Overlands were fairly negligent about that sort of vanity, and even on the holo-comm, there are only a handful of images of him when he was younger. Over the years of his absence, she's mostly forgotten what he used to look like. But now, this stranger's face sends a jolt of recognition through her.

It's not moonlight: his hair is _white_. And he's always been taller than she is, but he's still taller now, with a wiry sort of leanness to his limbs. Even in the biting cold, he wears only a thin leather jacket—nothing like the rags they both used to wear—and worn brown boots. But the look in his eyes is somehow unchanged, even though they are now a piercing shade of blue. He looks at her pleadingly.

"Hey, Mags," he says quietly, and if there had been any doubt in her mind, it was gone. No one calls her that. No one but her idiot brother.

"Jack_._" She's not even sure if it's a question, but he nods once in confirmation anyway.

In the years since her brother left her, Maggie's spent an inordinate amount of time considering her response if and when he ever reappears. Depending on the way he showed up—in a blaze of glory, probably, or contritely bearing some stupid treasure like a cat bringing back a dead sparrow after puking all over the floor—she's had several reactions lined up. Punching, hugging, shouting, snarling, crying. But she realizes that it's _this _reentrance, this quiet and unpretentious appearance back at home, that is most like her brother. Firm. Dutiful. Because that's what he's always said, isn't it? That it's his duty to protect and look after her?

Maggie is surprised at the coolness that washes over him. She stares at him evenly. "'I'll be back?' Really? You're planning on leaving for somewhere _across the cosmos _and that's what you go with?"

"It was…a pretty hazy timeline," her brother declares, gently pushing Spruce's muzzle away. The sheepdog's tail is wagging furiously as she winds back and forth around Jack's legs. "I didn't know when I was coming back, and you know what I like to say. If you're going to have to keep your lies straight, the best way is not to tell them at all."

The philosophy, stated with a casual roll of the shoulder, is so familiar that a smile cracks across Maggie's face before she can stop it. Jack instantly grins back at her. For a moment, she's surprised by the fact that this whole thing is so _fluid, _like leaping into a pool of water only to realize you haven't forgotten how to swim after all. And then she remembers how furious she is with him.

"So." Schooling her features, she casually stamps snow from the sides of her boots, determined to behave as though her brother isn't back for the first time in years. "What took you?"

At the change in her tone, Jack's grin drops away. He rubs the back of his neck, a solemn expression on his face. "I was a little too confident," he admits. "Bit off more trouble than I could handle this time, rushing into a contract with the Collectors so fast."

She raises her eyebrows, letting her skepticism ooze out in waves. The Jack she knows has an uncanny knack for slipping into and out of trouble with an almost enviable smoothness. She's seen her brother convince off-world merchants that his theft of food was just a misunderstanding, and he even once managed to artfully extricate himself from a scrape involving a pair of hotheaded foreign soldiers.

Jack catches the look and seems to follow her line of thought. He grimaces. "You were right about the Collectors, you know. Nothing was like they promised. I got there and…" he shakes his head, leaning against the fence again. Spruce settles at his heels. "It's a long story."

Maggie frowns at him unrepentantly. "Seems simple enough to me. You left all of a sudden without saying goodbye—_oh, don't give me that,_" she adds before he can interrupt, her voice rising. "You didn't _really _say goodbye, and you know it. And then you couldn't even be bothered to send a message. I know we barely get the local Net here, Jack, but _cosmos, _you could have shipped me a letter or a package or _something _to let me know you were still out there! Not a word for _years_? You weren't supposed to do that. You were supposed to—" _You were supposed to take care of me, _is what she doesn't say. Because she doesn't need Jack, and she hasn't needed him for some time. Not after he cast her away. "The money helped," she admits begrudgingly. "At least I knew you were alive. And I really needed it—even if it was next to nothing. Except when the payments stopped. Then they got really irregular."

She phrases the last part casually, shrugging her shoulders as if it doesn't matter, but Jack recognizes it for the question it is. "Yeah, well. Pitch Black—the one in charge of the Collectors—he stopped pretending to be nice enough to pay families. Guess he ended up with too many people to pay all of them, even though he started losing some of us." The response is incredibly vague, but Maggie refuses to ask more questions, refuses to admit her worries. "And after I ditched the Collectors for good, I didn't exactly have regular work—just found jobs where I could."

"And you thought to yourself, 'Well, I'm already out here. Might as well fly around a while if I can, because it's a hell of a lot better than going home—'"

"That wasn't—you know I wouldn't do that—"

"Except you _did—_"

"I was afraid the Collectors were gonna chase after me, Mags. If I came back here, they would have tracked me down for sure. And probably dragged you and Mom right into it."

"Maybe you need to just stop—_protecting _me, Jack. You don't decide that you get to give everything up for me. You don't get to decide to throw your life away. You _always _do this—!"

"Cosmos, Mags, what are you even talking about?"

"—one second, we're practically telepathic, and I feel like I know everything that's going on in your head, and the next, you do something completely crazy or stupid to 'help protect me.' Like all those things you made sure Mama blamed only you for, not me. Or whenever you pretended you dragged me into stealing food. Or like that time at the lake."

Mags knows it's the wrong thing to say before she even says the words, but she still can't keep them from pushing their way out of her mouth. Her brother's face instantly wipes clean of all emotion, the way water ripples fade away to leave a pond's surface perfectly smooth. "I'd do that again," Jack says finally.

"All I'm saying is if things went different that day, we'd have both drowned because you decided to throw your life away for me, instead of just me drowning. And that's not what I want."

"I'd do it again," her brother repeats staunchly.

Huffing in frustration, Mags shoves her face in her hands. "Well, you _did, _just in a different way. You just left without saying anything—and _I know you probably thought you were helping,_" she adds loudly as Jack begins to speak, "and I know you probably thought, 'We need the money,' or 'I'm the worst brother ever even though I basically saved your life, Maggie,' or something incredibly _stupid, _but it killed me. When you left, it was the worst, and you have to stop doing it. Throwing things away for me. Just…_stop_." Maggie is almost ashamed to find tears pricking the corners of her eyes, and she blinks them away furiously.

Jack nods slowly, frowning at her after her outburst, and looks out into the woods. Maggie wonders where the easy camaraderie of a few minutes ago has gone, because he the look on his face seems more distant than ever. He's more like a stranger somehow—though she can almost feel him processing her words, internalizing them. She shifts uncomfortably, wondering if she should invite him inside so they can talk. As if it isn't his house, too. Or is it his house? Can he still call it home if he hasn't set foot in it in years?

One of the boards squeaks as he leans against it, and Jack jolts forward and then turns to look at it. For the first time, Maggie sees the fence the way he must: discolored and weather-worn planks with rusted nails and small missing pieces. The house is worse off, if only he could see it in the darkness. Maggie's kept the place afloat—she's done a _great _job of it with what she's had to work with—but she can't repair everything that needs fixing, not on her own. She's looked at the fence and the broken tiles on the roof and the slanted storage shed from time to time, thinking she ought to get someone from town to help her chop and haul new wood to repair the damaged sections, but it's too much trouble. Too much expense. The shed still stores their tools, and the roof still keeps the rain out, and the fence keeps the sheep in, and she doesn't have the time or money to worry about anything more than that.

_It would be easier if you were here to help me, _she thinks, but instead she says, "Your hair's different now." It's a stupid thing to say, but she's been watching the moonlight glint off of his strange white hair for the last few minutes, clinging to this tangible sign that this is no longer the brother she once knew.

Jack's hand reaches up to flatten his hair in an almost anxious gesture, as if he can wipe the color away. "Yeah, it was a side effect of…well. What happened with the Collectors. What Pitch did."

His expression is so bitter that Maggie can't help but blurt, "It's not bad." He smiles faintly, and she bites her tongue. "Anyway. There's no money for the fence right now."

"I thought—with the credits—"

Maggie shakes her head. "Everything went to paying off the house. And all of Mama's debts. She's dead, you know," she adds bluntly. "With all those liver problems. And about three years ago, she just…went to sleep. Never got up."

To anyone else, Maggie thinks her brother might look appropriately grieved: the confused furrow to his brows smoothes away, and his jaw tightens as though his teeth are grit against the news. But Maggie recognizes something subtle in his breathing, a languid sort of relief that betrays his easy acceptance of the idea.

It's not so far from how she feels, truth be told. Rebecca Overland did little to endear herself to either of her children throughout the final years of her life. She had once behaved as a mother to them, but it was a very long time ago, and Maggie has always had a hard time muddling through the vague memories of her early childhood to remember the person her mother used to be. Jack is probably more intimately familiar with the change, being several years older when their father left and their mother fell to pieces, but he'd only rarely expressed any compassion or regret for her altered character to Maggie. It's one of the few things about himself he has always kept hidden from her, but she can understand why: displaying anything less than the expected affection for their mother, especially to others, has always seemed shameful to her as well.

Finding herself straying down the path to sympathy, which she is the last thing she wants to show her brother, Maggie adds spitefully, "She said you broke her heart by leaving us alone. She said couldn't bear to live knowing her son had abandoned his own mother and sister."

Privately, of course, Maggie knows that there had been little truth behind Rebecca Overland's words. Her mother didn't care. Not about Maggie, and certainly not about Jack. She'd cared more about the loss of the free labor than anything else, and she'd worried where her medicine would come from next, but if her mother had felt anything beyond the realm of spite and irritation toward her son's departure, Maggie had never seen it.

She'd mostly said the words vindictively, wanting to see the look on Jack's face, but he bows his head toward Spruce, rubbing her head absently. When he looks back up at her, his face is again wiped clean. "I'm sorry you had to deal with it alone," Jack murmurs. Not the most appropriate consolation by most standards, but Maggie finds that she can't think of anything more fitting. Neither of them have any lasting attachment to their mother that hasn't been irreparably damaged by her foul mistreatment of them and her self-centered indolence, but it was Maggie who had to pretend otherwise. It was Maggie who plastered on a mask of sorrow for the benefit of the village onlookers and gossipmongers, Maggie who had dodged her mother's debtors until Jack's first paychecks began to pour in, Maggie who had gone to the stonemason to pick the cheapest placard for the gravesite, Maggie who had publicly grieved for months—as was expected—in the worn black dress that had once belonged to a younger version of her mother.

She lets out a long breath. "What does it say about me that I did all that?"

The murmured question isn't really directed at Jack, but he manages to follow her line of thought regardless. "Nothing bad," he replies. "You did what you had to. It's what you've always done. You've always been the one who held us together, even when Mom and I spent most of the time being pissed at each other. You were always the one going back and forth between us, getting things done. You were always the strong one, Mags."

A sudden lightness falls over Maggie at the earnestness of his expression, and it's only now that she realizes that these are the words she's been waiting to hear. After all this time, she'd half expected Jack to ride in on the wind, martyred and haughty and determined. Sweeping into town to _save her _from her boring life. Or else she'd pictured him coming back crushed and hunted looking, like he always was when he felt he bore the weight of the world on his shoulder. It had been some time since she'd seen the version of Jack she once knew, the one who was slyly mischievous when he knew anyone was watching and sincerely affectionate when he didn't.

There are hints of the old, mischievous Jack, the familiar one. Traces of him poke out every now and again in the slight curve of a smile or the haughty placement of hands on hips. They flicker just under the surface of his skin, and Maggie thinks that they can be teased out in time.

But Jack has changed. It's more than physical, though there's certainly that, too—the sudden leanness of him, the way he's grown several inches before his body had time to consider what it was up to, the absurd shock of white hair fluttering in the winter wind like the frills of a dandelion, the bleak blueness of his eyes, the new sharpness of his shoulders and jawline. But he's also somehow more serious. Rather than imperiously prompting her to answer questions, he waits coolly for her to work the words out, his hands shoved into the pockets of his jacket. Calmly, as though in his adventures he stumbled across a stockpile of more time. He's more confident, she thinks, but not in his old brash and rebellious way. In a strangely _certain_ way.

She hadn't expected an admittance like that from Jack. Not from the old Jack, anyway, not for him to acknowledge that she'd done enough for herself, maybe even more than he'd been able to do for her.

And she wonders, as he leans over once more at Spruce's stubborn whines to scratch her ear, whether he is studying her as well—not as overtly as she's staring at him, of course—to catalogue her differences, to compare one copy of Maggie against another. And then she brushes the thought away as foolish. Of course he is.

The thought settles her. They've come to even ground now, both of them curious and uncertain and too stubborn to show it.

Jack straightens again, cocking his head at her as he shoves his hands back into his pockets, and Maggie looks at his thin clothes as if for the first time. "Maybe we should find somewhere else to talk," she begins uncertainly, pulling her own coat more tightly across her front. The house will be a little cold before she has the chance to put wood into the furnace, but it will be out of the wind, at least.

Her brother smiles. "Yeah," he says, looking at the house and then back at her. "But not here. Let's go for a walk. I know a place."

.

The town's tiny shipyard is a brown and dead thing, more of a barren field than anything else. Dry patches of grass and parched, alkali soil is interspersed with winding dirt roads that wander as aimlessly as slug trails between fuel stations and abandoned loading carts. The ground is always clear, at least: in addition to the market road, it's one of the few areas of the town that has the advantage of a dedicated workforce that clears away the regular layers of ice and snow.

Maggie perches on the rusted fence, her heels hooked onto a lower rail, and Jack stands behind it, leaning his forearms on top as he catalogues the details of the ship he flew here on—_his _ship, if his story is to be believed. He seems dreamily enamored with the very idea of the spacecraft, which is "a completely custom job—even though I doubt North knew much of what he was doing, he must have described what he wanted to a specialist who really _did_" and "perfect for a small crew, because you don't have to worry about some of the utility systems on bigger ships" and one that "has rear propulsion engines to get unbeatable speeds, almost as good as _Cespare _class crafts" and "comes with the newest ADA-compatible lasers, too."

Maggie's not sure what most of this means, but even without Jack's babble, it's obvious that the ship gleams like a small star in the moonlight, stark in comparison to the dingy grey spacecrafts around it. Better crafted than the trade ships they usually get, too—and sleeker, like a silver fish. But she can't see what Jack does, no matter how hard she tries. It's as though he knows another language, one totally unfamiliar to her, that lets him understand parts of the ship she can't.

"It's kind of battered, actually—you can see the scars from laser fire under some of the rotors, because we haven't had a second to buff it back up, but it runs like a dream anyway, and we upgraded to the EC-class rear thrusters after the fact—they're like the ones you find on some of the military-grade recon crafts like the _Sealis_…"

At first, Maggie had the slight suspicion that Jack was trying too hard. It had only taken her a few minutes to realize that he really _isn't. _Overcome by genuine enthusiasm, he's allowed himself to be carried away by his own babble, and Maggie wonders who this boy is, someone who can discuss thrusters and rotors in the same breath with all the confidence of one who has tested multiple ship models.

"So what happened to you?" she asks when he finally pauses to stare at the ship again. "And no bullshit about long stories. It's been years. We have the time."

After ages spent talking, Jack is quiet for the first time. He exhales slowly, shuffling on the hard-packed ground, but he finally nods in agreement.

The story is so fantastic that he might as well have pulled parts of it from one of the trashy space operas their mother used to read. He takes the story up at the moment he'd left, explaining his trip aboard the Collector ship. A researcher and tycoon taking people prisoner, horrible experiments that brought strange abilities and altered his appearance—which he's faintly self-conscious about in front of her, Maggie can tell—and then escaping by ship and living in fear of being caught, taking smuggling jobs, being sponsored by a group of famous industrialists Jack calls "the Guardians." It's all so incredible that Maggie might have thought he was lying to her—maybe _should _have thought it, after all Jack's done—but the idea doesn't settle in her mind for long. Jack is the type to embellish, to be sure, but she doesn't believe he would do so here. He owes her the truth, and they both know it. And he wouldn't do anything to mess this up.

"They really did give me the ship in the end," he explains finally. The whole time he's been talking, he's stared out at the ship, not really seeing it, but now he turns back to her. "It's perfect. I can—go anywhere, do anything. _We _can," he amends, smiling a little. "I picked up a few stowaways. Some of the kids from around here who didn't have anyone to go back to. Like the Bennetts. You remember Jamie?"

It had been some time since Maggie had thought of him, but at the sound of his name, an image blossoms in her mind of the boy with puppy dog eyes who had followed Jack around for some time when they were all young. She nods slowly.

"They're…helping. It's hard to say what we'll be getting into, exactly, but it's nice to have someone to help out on board. Repairs, cooking, navigation, inventory, communications…that kind of thing. And Mags—I want you to come, too. If you want."

She's only half-expecting the question. The pair of them may be at odds, may not have seen each other in years, but they are still siblings, and at their cores, they are fundamentally linked. Jack wouldn't leave her alone on this planet, not if he had any recourse to offer her a better life. And it's what they've always wanted, isn't it? To get off of this icy rock, to travel and explore the Reaches, to—well, this last had been only Maggie's dream—to find any information on what had become of their father.

She stares at him blankly anyway. A response escapes her.

Jack tries to fill her silence. "Mom's gone, and…this isn't the life we wanted. Remember we used to plan like we were gonna sneak aboard a trade ship? See where we ended up?" His smile falters a little, but he plasters it on relentlessly. "Come with me, Mags," he begs.

Maggie opens her mouth and then presses it closed. In the three years she's been on her own, she's poured a lot of effort into this life. Paying off the debtors so she can live in her own house after all, pouring her time and money into the vegetables she grows in plastic bins under the windowed patio, training to be an apothecary so she can support herself if Jack's paychecks ever run out. But in the end, there's no way she can turn down what her brother offers—and she would drop the remnants of her life in a second.

Jack looks anxiously back at the ship, which gives her a second to think. She takes a breath. "I'm supposed to test to be an apothecary soon," she begins, shrugging casually, and there's a bit of coolness in her words. She still can't quite bring herself to allow Jack to see how pleased she is. "But it's standardized, and I think I can schedule it at a HAB Sector planet if it comes down to it. And there are some plants I'm growing back at home—berries and vegetables and herbs, all in pots. We're taking those, too. I'm sure there's a way to keep them growing."

It takes Jack a few seconds to dissect her words and realize her answer, and he appears to be fighting back a smile in spite of her sullen tone. "Okay. Okay, we can definitely do that. Anything else?"

Like it's a negotiation for a bartered deal or contract. Maybe it is. Maggie casts around for anything else, as though she has to organize all of the contract's components before she finalizes it by holo-comm. She looks down at her feet, where Spruce lazes on the ground between us. "And she's coming with us," she adds defiantly, pointing at the dog.

"The more, the merrier." Spruce, the traitor, seems to know that Jack is talking about her, because she stands, tail wagging, to let him scratch her head.

"And you have to _tell _me everything. Like you used to. No more stupid secrets or trying to protect me or anything like that. I'm grown up now, Jack," she says, realizing how foolishly imperious the statement sounds. "I can handle things on my own now."

Even so, her brother looks her up and down seriously, nodding. "Yeah, you can," he says quietly. "And that's fair. No more secrets."

She nods, a little uncertain.

"But you're really coming?" Jack asks hopefully. "We can go start getting your stuff. We can ship out…well, whenever you're ready to go, really. Okay?"

He cocks his head, still keeping his face carefully blank, and she thinks that this is probably the moment where she's supposed to say _Alright, you're forgiven_ or maybe _I get why you did it. _But she bites her tongue. Jack must know already, because those are the kinds of things they have never really had to say to each other.

And even if he doesn't know, there will be plenty of time for him to figure it out. She takes a deep breath, suddenly realizing that now, suddenly, there is an entire future ahead of them both. There will be plenty of time for everything.

So instead, Maggie folds her arms haughtily across her chest, looking down her nose at Jack. The pose is exaggerated, almost playful, and her brother smiles as if the movement is a secret signal.

"I've been stuck here for ages," she gripes, returning his smile. "Of course I'm ready. What are we waiting for?"

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Fin

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**A/N:** So if you've finally made it all the way to the end, thank you so much for sticking with this story! I set out to write something fun and somewhat fluffy and a little weird, and I'm really glad that I got to share it with all of you. If you favorited, set up an alert, or reviewed, you're amazing...And I don't want to say that it's fate, buuut Jack is basically always gonna be a Guardian, no matter which universe he's in. Only here, he's rocking a starship on his way to look out for kids in the Reaches and beyond, and he's got a lot of extra help to do it!

On a potential sequel: A few of you have asked about (or demanded!) a sequel, and I do have a few ideas for one. I may eventually sit down to write it. But IF I do, it won't be for quite some time: I am in the middle of a Hunger Games fic I am wildly attached to, and I'm currently outlining an epically long Harry Potter fic/series that will definitely take ages to write. I'll probably pop back into the RotG fandom every now and then to post a few one-shot ideas I have, but long stories/sequels are currently on the backburner.

That being said, I may or may not gather my notes together at some point to put up a (very) brief glossary that covers some of the main locations of the Reaches/HAB Sector planets and some of the key organizations as well as a short background and history of the main characters, so be on the lookout just in case.

And now that we're done, please leave one last review on your way out—I'd love to hear your thoughts on the epilogue :-)

Again, thanks to all of you for traveling with me on this journey. It's been a blast!

See you next time,

ket


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